Todd, Tim and Kellan Cook love Baseball, the Seattle Mariners and trekking around the country to visit stadiums and watch games. These are their stories. #FatherSonBaseball

Results tagged ‘ Oakland Athletics ’

During the week leading up to Saturday, April 28, 2012, we were looking forward to our first game of the season at Camden Yards. But the weather outlook was sketchy. Rain seemed to be in the forecast. And I was going back-and-forth regarding whether Kellan should join me and Tim for this game. I wanted him to join us, but I feared having to corral him in the rain. But on Friday, I made the decision: Kellan would definitely join us.

So let’s do it.

It was our first night game of the season. After having a nice relaxing day lounging around the house, we hopped in the car where Tim and Kellan kept themselves entertained during the drive south:

When we walked up to the stadium at 4:30 in the afternoon, a huge crowd was already waiting at the gates…

…, which apparently upset Kellan (he wasn’t too interested in getting his picture at the time).

Luckily, when it comes to Camden Yards, we know *people* and those people are permanently first in line…

…and so were we. In that last picture, along with Tim, Avi Miller and Matt Hersl, that is 1,100+ baseball ballhawk and east coast Oakland A’s fan, Rick Gold. Rick and I have known each other for a while through myGameBalls.com and twitter, but this was the first time we had ever met in person. Despite rooting for the wrong A.L. West team, Rick is a pretty cool guy.

Kellan grabbed a spot on the backpack-checking table and had a great time hanging out with the guys:

The crowd was so big because the Orioles were set to unveil a new Frank Robinson statue at a ceremony at 5:15 p.m. The ceremonyfeatured Robinson, Hank Aaron, Eddie Murray, Earl Weaver, Jim Palmer and others. As we waited at the gate, Hammerin’ Hank Aaron and his wife zoomed by (inside the gate) on a golf cart. A few minutes later, Eddie Murray walked by…

…and I took two of the worst possible pictures of him – that last one is the *better* of my two Eddie Murray pictures! The statue unveiling was part of the Orioles’ celebration of the 20th anniversary of Camden Yards. (Think, when Camden Yards opened, Fenway Park was a mere 80-year-old spring chicken of a ballpark).

I knew Hank Aaron was going to be at this game, and I really wanted to see him in person. But I didn’t want to sit through the crowded ceremony. So we headed into the ballpark for BP once the gates opened. As usual, we headed for the third base line:

Kellan absolutely loves wearing his glove and trying to catch baseballs around the house. His hand is so tiny that he cannot close the glove so he relies on the ball just landing in there and not bouncing out. Early in BP, he made his first ever attempt on a toss-up from a MLB player, Orioles pitcher Brian Matusz (who was wearing a “Brady Anderson” embroidered glove):

That is easily my favorite picture of the season so far. In our first three games, my camera has been annoying me like nobody’s business. It is ruining a ton of my pictures and really seems to have it out for me. But my camera apparently felt the gravity of the situation and it worked perfectly in the crunch and captured that last picture.

Thanks, Camera!

And thank you, too, Brian Matusz!

By the way, the ball bounced off of the side of Kellan’s glove and fell to his feet. But it was a great moment anyway.

Kellan grabbed his new baseball and held it tight:

Hey, remember that ceremony I mentioned? During BP, it was taking place in the picnic area behind the bullpens:

We decided to head over there for a little peak. But it was so crowded we could hardly see the panel of Hall of Famers – and my only picture attempt came out totally unrecognizable because I had to take the photo through trees, flowers, people, etc., etc.

We decided to head off to the restroom. Normally, cameras are off limits in the restrooms, but I couldn’t help taking this next one because Kellan looked so cute and funny lying on the flip-down baby changing table with is big baseball glove:

He was like, “Hey, let’s get this done so we can get back out there!”

And get back out there we did.

We headed back to the third base line. Unfortunately, he had taken Kellan’s umbrella stroller into the stadium, which was a terrible idea. Tim was in charge of rolling it around (empty) and finding places to stash it during BP. He seemed to like taking charge of this task and he was vehemently opposed to just leaving it out in deep LF while we went back to the third base line.

Anyway…when we returned to the field, the A’s pitchers were playing catch down the line. When he finished playing catch, we thought Jim Miller was going to throw a baseball to Tim. We were both excited for the third chance in three weeks for Tim to catch a toss-up from a player. But then Miller decided to walk it over and hand-deposit it into Tim’s glove:

Thanks, Mr. Miller!

Although there was no one in our vicinity blocking the rows of seats, Tim decided to climb back up to our spot in the tenth row (which I figured was out of foul ball range – I didn’t want any baseballs beaning my boys):

It was a long slow climb and during the process Tim dropped his baseball. It rolled all the way back down to the first row. I had to run back down and scooped it up for Tim.

Although we weren’t *at* the Frank Robinson ceremony, it was pretty cool being inside the ballpark during the unveiling. They had lots of nice videos playing on the scoreboards…

…and all of the speakers were broadcast over the PA system. It was really cool being in the same building and hearing Hank Aaron speaking about his friend Frank Robinson, and then hearing Frank Robinson talk about himself and his teammates.

Tim decided he wanted to scoot out to LF by the bullpens so we could see Avi. We walked out there, didn’t find Avi, and, almost immediately, it started raining and BP was cancelled. Out came the tarp:

And off we headed to the Club Level to eat some snacks and avoid the rain:

We were up there a loooooooooooooooooooooooong time. I’m not sure what time the rain started coming down, but it felt like we were up in the Club Level for about ten hours. When I finally looked at the clock on my phone, I saw that it was still another whole hour until the game was set to start! Yikes. Rain outs during BP make for a whole lotta down time.

After the boys ate a ton of snacks, we walked all over the Club Level and I took a bunch of photos of the various lounge areas. The Club Level at Camden Yards is not all that fancy, but it’s a good place to duck into and kill some time when it is raining. Here is what it looks like…

…and…

…and…

…and this is in a glass case just behind the main entrance to the Club Level:

We eventually ran into Avi and a couple of his friends in one of the little lounge areas. I sat down and chatted with them while Tim danced and tried to entertain everyone…

…and Kellan ran a million laps around two people sitting in chairs watching TV (one of them is above Kellan in that picture). Eventually, this resulted in a giant catastrophe – Tim decided to show Avi’s friends how fast he is, so he ran two laps around the chairs in the opposite direction of Kellan and the two collided chest-to-chest on the second lap. I could see it about to happen in slow motion as the scene unfolded, but I was helpless to stop it. Tim completely flattened Kellan, who fell back and smacked his head on the floor. It was a bad scene with lots and lots of crying.

Luckily, after five minutes sobbing uncontrollably on my shoulder, Kellan pulled through and was back to giggling and running around again.

When they did a second ceremony on the field, I snuck outside and snapped a few pictures:

In the upper left, that is Earl Weaver walking the “orange carpet.” In the bottom right, of course, that is Hammerin’ Hank Aaron.

Hidden under the orange sheet (bottom left), the Orioles presented Frank Robinson with a 2-foot tall replica of his new statue. Half an hour later, two guys walked by us in the Club Level carrying that little statue (which looked really heavy) to a suite (which I assumed was the owner’s suite) where all of the Hall of Famers watched the game.

All of a sudden, Hall of Famer Jim Palmer walked by and posed for a picture with (grumpy looking) Tim:

Although he has such a wonderful smile, Tim is prone to do these “grumpy” faces in pictures because he thinks it makes him look cool. He’s a big fan of being cool! Always has been. Growing up is an interesting process, eh? He keeps it fun, even if his *cool* / *grumpy* face stands in for his big smile in some pictures.

Anyway, after the photo with grumpy-faced Tim, Jim Palmer handed a “Luis Ayala” embroidered glove to Tim and was like “here, try this on.” Then Palmer handed Tim a baseball and was like, “here, hold this baseball…but you can’t have it because I have to give it to Frank Robinson.” I’m pretty sure the glove and baseball were used by Frank Robinson when he threw out the first pitch.

As the game started, it was time for some dinner. Kellan and I shared nachos…

…and Tim opted for some chicken fingers and fries.

After eating, the three of us headed out to the newly redesigned flag court:

The previous tall, two foot wide padded wall at the front of the flag court is now replaced with a short wrought iron fence. Just like when Tim was 2-3 years old, Kellan LOVED the flag court and he ran around like crazy all over the flag court and Eutaw Street.

Chasing Kellan in the flag court was too much work for both me and Tim, so we decided to take the long way around the ballpark on our way out to left field. On our way by RF, I noticed that the Orioles had a “20” painted on the grass in RF:

Of course, Frank Robinson played RF and the Orioles have retired his number 20.

While we were out in the flag court, it was the top of the second inning and the Orioles put up a 5-spot on the strength of six singles (by Adam Jones, Wilson Betemit, Chris Davis, Ronny Paulino, Robert Andino, and Nolan Reimold) and a sacrifice fly by J.J. Hardy.

That made the score 5-0 Orioles.

We never headed up there to check it out, but on our walk around the stadium, I took this photo of the new party deck above the batters’ eye:

And as we neared home plate, the A’s prized offseason acquisition, Yoenis Cespedes, had his turn at the plate:

He came up empty on that hack, and then hit a foul pop out to first base.

When we reached LF, we headed out to see the new Frank Robinson statue in the picnic area (which appears to be open to the public now, or at least it was for this game):

Then we grabbed some empty seats in section 86:

Although it was still drizzling a bit, the boys shared a swirl ice cream helmet:

And then they watched the very light rain fall on us:

Tim grabbed his glove and tried to catch specific drops as he tracked them on their way down to earth.

While we were out in LF, Adam Jones led off the top of the third inning with a single and then scored the Orioles sixth run of the night on a double by Wilson Betemit. That made it 6-0 Orioles. Things were looking good for the Orioles on a night dedicated to celebrating Frank Robinson.

Around the fifth inning, we relocated to the cross-aisle behind home plate. This was our view for a big chunk of the rest of the game:

Tim and I watched for foul balls (and a couple came somewhat close to us) while Kellan relaxed in my arms, never quite falling asleep.

During the seventh inning stretch, the Orioles Bird (as he is prone to do) sat on the ledge of the TV booth behind home plate. Kellan totally loved it and he repeated “BIRD!” about 800 times. While the Bird was up there, Kellan’s “BIRDs” were declaratory (i.e., “there is a bird!”). Then, after the Bird left the ledge, Kellan’s “BIRDs” turned inquisitive in nature (i.e., “where are you, bird?”). It was pretty cute.

In the seventh inning, Chris Davis blasted a monster homerun to RF:

The homerun cleared the flag court and crashed down on Eutaw Street. After the game, I heard one of the TV announcers mention that it was the 25th Orioles homerun to land on Eutaw Street…or maybe Davis was the 25th Oriole to hit a homerun out to Eutaw Street, I’m not quite sure.

I missed some scoring, the Davis blast made the score 10-1 Orioles.

We decided to head back up to the Club Level where we had left Kellan’s stroller at the front desk. We really went up there because Tim wanted to see Avi. We met up with Avi and watched Bryce Harper’s first at bat of his MLB career…an incredibly weak groundout to the pitcher.

And then we all (including Avi) headed back down to the Cross Aisle behind home plate. As we approached our spot, someone hit a foul ball to the guy sitting next to the person directly behind/above the spot where we had been standing for several innings. Had we been there, I might have had a play on it, but it would have required me to make a jumping catch above my head while holding Kellan, which would have been very difficult. We still could have got it if the ball had bounced down into the Cross Aisle, but the guy took the ball directly to his gut, and it fell harmlessly to his feet for an easy pick up. He was from Oakland (or at least he was decked out in A’s gear) so it was no doubt a cool moment for the guy.

Anyway, we went back to our same spot. Over the course of a bunch of innings standing in the Cross Aisle, none of the ushers ever told us to get out of there. In fact, one of them eventually came and said, “Hey, why don’t you just sit down right here?” He was concerned that someone else running for a foul ball might fun us over.

So we obliged him:

And each half inning until the game ended, we crept up a little closer to the field:

I took some random action shots…

…but the scoring was done for the night.

We kept moving forward because I wanted to go for an umpire ball. As we got closer and closer, about 10,000 kids, teens and adults all flocked to the tunnel with the same idea. I guess everyone wants one of those nice commemorative Camden Yards 20th Anniversary baseballs.

We made it to the very bottom spot and we were the first people there when home plate umpire Eric Cooper left the field of play. But he completely ignored everyone and gave out zero of those fancy commemorative baseballs.

We had one more idea – get over to the Orioles dugout (which was packed with fans) to see if anyone might toss up a commemorative baseball over there.

No such luck.

But that doesn’t mean there was *no luck* — indeed, there was a lot of luck left hanging in the night air.

As Orioles bullpen catcher Ronnie Deck approached the dugout, I called out, “Hey, Ronnie!” and gave him the obligatory *hit me* glove flap. He had an equipment bag (which no doubt had a commemorative baseball nestled inside) hanging from his shoulder, but Ronnie just held out his open glove to show us *no baseball*, but then he looked down into his glove and gave himself a little *hmmm, okay* shrug. He reached into his baseball glove, grabbed his batting gloves and tossed them to us.

The fans in front of us were nice enough not to intercept the gloves, which were clearly intended for us but would have been easy for another couple fans to catch before they reached us, and I caught them in my baseball glove.

Tim was SUPER-EXCITED about these batting gloves.

An usher took a picture of the three of us with our post-game prize:

Avi witnessed the toss-up from Ronnie Deck and came over to chat with us. Before we headed out, I took two pictures of Tim and Avi. Avi decided to smile in the first picture, and Tim decided to smile in the second picture, so let’s take a look at both:

Before we left the stadium, we got one last picture of Tim and his new gloves (no chance he is sharing them with his little bro!):

Note the cool “20” with a spot light on the side of the warehouse behind Tim. Cool.

When we got to the car, Tim told me not to tell mommy about the gloves. They were a secret. When we got off the phone, he asked if he could show her something when he got home. Something secret. He slept then entire ride home (as did Kellan). But at 1:00 a.m., Tim let mommy in on his little secret before hopping into his bed.

So, there you go, a great night of baseball at Camden Yards. Now we have an off-week and then it’s time for the Fifth Annual Cook Grandfather-Father-Son Baseball Roadtrip. It is going to be an AWESOME trip this season with stops in Minnesota, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver. Our Mariners/Rockies games in Denver will mark a major milestone for me and Tim: we will finally have seen all thirty MLB teams play a home game (of course, with the opening of Marlins Park this season, we now have to go back to Miami before we can say we have been to every current MLB stadium – that will happen in September!).

This season’s GFS Roadtrip will also be extra special because it will feature a new and improved lineup: Jim, Todd, Tim andKellan! That’s double the “Sons” and double the fun!

All good things have to come to an end. Even the baseball season. And so the Mariners 2011 season ended on September 28, 2011, and we were there for it. This is the story.

The line-up was different for this game. Kellan had a few sniffles, so we didn’t want him to get sick. So Colleen and Kellan sat this one out. Meanwhile, my brother and sister-in-law were expecting the birth of their first baby any day so my mom stayed home in case the baby wanted to make an appearance that day (he didn’t).

So it was me, Tim, my dad, and my best buddy Paul at this game. Paul would come straight from work and meet us at game time.

If I ran the Mariners, there would definitely, absolutely, without question be batting practice on the final day of the season. Sadly, I do not run the Mariners so, despite the fact it was a night game, I was uncertain and doubtful that there would be batting practice.

I tweeted to some Mariners and Mariners personnel in hopes of figuring out whether it would be worthwhile arriving two hours before game time. Word finally came in from Mariners broadcaster Dave Sims…

…but it was too late. We arrived early for (no) BP.

No problem. Nothing wrong with several hours of hanging out at Safeco Field, even if nothing is happening.

And that is exactly what was happening. Nothing.

When we arrived, there were two Mariners playing catch along the RF foul line. Before the rest of the stadium opened for the fans, the two Mariners were long gone. We did not see another uniformed Mariner for about an hour-and-a-half.

We headed into the infield seats and did some quality hanging out:

We did *a lot* of hanging out. We stayed down the RF line hoping some Mariners would come out to play catch. It wasn’t happening. We grabbed some seats and just chatted to pass time:

Eventually, a Mariners groundskeeper came walking by on his way to the outfield. He walked right up to us and stopped in front of Tim –

Groundskeeper: I bet you arrived early because you wanted to see batting practice, right?

Tim: Uh, huh.

Groundskeeper: You probably wanted to catch a baseball, right?

Tim: Uh, huh.

And then the groundskeeper pulled our final baseball of the season out of his pocket and handed it to Tim:

Thanks, Groundskeeperdude!

A bunch of A’s pitchers came out and played catch down the LF line. We didn’t even budge. We didn’t want to miss out on any time with our Mariners, in case the Mariners happened to come out and play catch.

So, we hung out some more. And I took this panorama from our spot in section 112:

Tim spent some time leaning over the short wall and playing with the warning track dirt:

Eventually, we gave up on the Mariners coming out – which was disappointing. I think the Mariners need to realize that their fans want to see the guys on the last day. It’s the end of a long grueling season for them and I understand that they are ready for a break and time to rest. But for the fans it is the last chance to see their guys until next season. So, hey, come on. Come out and be seen one last day. Rest tomorrow!

Anyway, we pulled up stakes and headed to the kids’ play area:

It could very well be Tim’s last time playing in the Mariners kids’ play area. There is a height limit, and Tim was only one inch below it. Next season, he’ll likely exceed it. So Tim enjoyed his time in the play area.

Eventually, we reported back to the RF/1B line to see if any Mariners were going to make a pre-game appearance. I really figured that tons of Mariners would be out signing for fans – that is what the fans want on the last day of the season! But it still was not happening.

We headed behind home plate for a panorama:

I got a better picture than the night before of the new Dave Niehaus sign:

Of course, I had to take a picture of the beautiful Safeco Field clock/sign above the LF bleachers:

Ah, it’s a great looking stadium sign out there. I could look at it all day.

Eventually, it really, truly did seem as if a bunch of Mariners were going to come out and do some pre-game autographing. We staked out a spot just past 1B. Shelly was ready with his blue sharpie:

We got our first signs of Mariners life – Chris Giminez and Jason Phillips made their way to the bullpen:

I was just taking the picture of Phillips and Giminez, but check out the situation that was unfolding on the out-of-town scoreboard? The A.L. wild card was still up for grabs. It would either be the Red Sox or the Rays. They were tied going into the day. And when Phillips and Giminez made their way out to the Mariners bullpen, the Red Sox were leading the Orioles 3-2 in the top of the seventh and the Yankees were leading the Rays 7-0 in the bottom of the sixth. Things were looking good for the Red Sox.

We like to get an autograph or two, but at this game I really wanted to collect a bunch of them. I had a plan. While my dad and Tim held our ground along the 1B line, I ran out to the bullpen. I did not know what my new nephew’s name would be, but I wanted to get a personalized signed baseball for him. Jason Phillips hook up me big time:

He signed the baseball on one side and wrote a personalized message (“Welcome to Life Mr. Cook!”) across the sweet spot of the ball. By the way, this was a ball that Casper Wells had thrown to some fans the day before. They dropped it into the gap and an usher eventually gave it to my dad and Kellan.

I reported back to Tim and my dad (can you spot them?)…

…with the baseball in hand. Now all I needed was for a ton of Mariners to add their signature along with Phillips’ signature. If that plan did not work, it would be a pretty weird “welcome to life” memento for my nephew.

Miguel Olivo came out to sign autographs, but he never moved from one spot. Neither did we. So we missed out on Olivo’s signature.

A bunch of Mariners did eventually come out to play catch and stretch:

And one of them (Kyle Seager) signed the baseball and Tim’s hat. Tim also got his had signed by this Mariners ball girl:

We still had a dismal two signatures on our baseball as game time approached. So before heading to our seats, Tim and I headed back to the bullpen and we struck Mariners gold over there. The guys in the bullpen were awesome – not just for me. The bullpen was doing what the whole team should have been doing during the whole pre-game – they were signing and signing and signing, and greeting and thanking fans. It was great. In all, I believe we got 10 signatures. Unfortunately, I did not keep a picture of the whole thing, but I think my nephew’s baseball was signed by: Jason Phillips, Kyle Seager, Brandon League, Chance Ruffin, Tom Wilhelmsen, Shawn Kelley, Jamey Wright, Jaime Navarro, Josh Lueke, Steve Delabar.

With the signed baseball in hand, we reported to our seats. And look who was there to root of the Mariners with us:

It’s Paulie!

It is always great to take in a game with Paulie. This would be the second season in a row that we’d close it out the Paul.

The game was a good one, but did not go the Mariners way. The A’s right fielder Jai Miller hit a 2-run homerun in the top of the second inning and the 2-0 score held up all night. Gio Gonzalez pitched a dandy for the A’s. He threw 8 innings and only gave up two hits. Not much you can do in terms of scoring runs when you’re only collecting 2 hits over the course of the game. But we had a heck of a time at the game nonetheless.

With not much action to photograph, I at least managed to get a good shot of Justin Smoak…

…wearing his face-protecting batting helmet extension. While it kept his mended face safe, it did not help Justin collect any hits.

A couple innings into the game, Tim and I went to get our final ice cream helmets of the season. We went to the ice cream place by the home plate end of the Mariners Hall of Fame. I had passed through the Hall of Fame the previous day, but Tim had not. So we took a stroll through it on our way to get ice cream.

Tim posed on the pick-off-a-homerun-ball wall:

In the Ichiro’s locker display, we saw the baseball that Ichiro slapped into history for his all-time single season record 262nd hit of 2004:

Tim posed with the Peanut Man memorial:

I sure wish Rick could have been here to toss us some peanuts at this game. He will be forever missed at Safeco Field.

The Mariners Hall of Fame is small. But there are some cool things to see in there. Tim posed with a display showing the innards of a baseball:

When we returned to the stands, I took a panorama from our seats in section 144:

I got these tickets on stubhub for cheap, cheap, cheap! Cheap tickets on stub hub is the best thing about the end of the season.

Tim thoroughly enjoyed his mint chocolate chip ice cream helmet:

But it made him hyper and cold. So we threw on my sweatshirt:

We were really hoping to see at least one more hit from Ichiro. But it wasn’t in the cards. He flew out in his second to last at bat of the season…

…and he finished the season with 184 hits and a .272 average.

Paul has incredibly awesome season tickets just a couple rows behind the Mariners dugout. This results in him not exploring the stadium much. All season, he had never been out to “The Pen.” So I took him out there so he could check it out:

As the game rolled on, we did a lot of scoreboard watching. By the end of the night, at lot of people were claiming this was one of the best days of baseball ever. The Red Sox folded in the ninth and ended up losing to the Orioles. Meanwhile, the Rays marched back from a 7-0 deficit to beat the Yankees 8-7 on a Evan Longoria homerun that punched the Rays’ ticket to the post-season, and ended the season for the Red Sox.

Mike Carp went down swinging in the bottom of the ninth to end the season for the Mariners. After the game, Paul got a season-ending shot of me, Tim and my dad:

We were right back at it on September 27, 2011. It was the second-to-last Mariners game of the season. Once again, my dad, Tim, Kellan and I headed down to Safeco Field for BP and my mom and Colleen met us just before game time.

We started out very much like the previous afternoon. My dad took Kellan and I took Tim. And we all headed to the SRO area in CF. Casper Wells was shagging balls in CF and he would directly and indirectly hook up both sets of us. First, he tossed a ball to a couple fans and they botched it. The ball fell down into the gap. Casper is still relatively new in Seattle and apparently did not know what it looked like behind the fence. He ran over, jumped up, hooked his arm over the wall, and peered down into the gap.

Casper saw the ball was a lost cause so he hopped down and gave the fans a shrug like, “Sorry! Nothing I can do about it now!”

Thirty second later, an usher walked through the gap and grabbed the ball. I knew just what would happen next. The usher looked up at the fans as he walked through the gap. He passed by the fans to whom Casper had thrown the ball and then he saw my dad and Kellan. He reached up and handed them the ball.

So after this, I figured that Casper was in a giving mood. When he caught his next fly ball, I called his name. He was a good distance out into the field, but he turned around and saw us and fired the ball to me and Tim. Here is Tim holding the ball from Casper with Casper in the background:

Check out that spiffy argyle mariners hat. That was in Tim’s sorry-you-got-beaned-by-a-BP-foul prize bag. It’s a kinda funny hat, but Tim loves it.

As 5:10 approached and the rest of the stadium was going to open, Tim and I headed over to the area behind the visitors’ bullpen. The sun streaming over the infield grandstands wreaked havoc on my camera. Here is a blurry panorama of the view from behind the bullpen:

Last season, it would have been impossible for a player on the field to throw a baseball to a fan behind the dugout But with the new “The Pen” set up…

…that is exactly what Jamey Wright did, and we were on the receiving end. It was an impressive throw over the bullpen.

Thanks, Jamey!

When the rest of the stadium opened, Tim, Kellan and I headed up the stairs…

…and scooted over to the corner spot in section 152.

Down below us and a little bit toward CF was…

…Brandon League, Jamey Wright and Jeff Gray. Someone hit a liner down the LF line that rolled to a stop on the warning track. Gray jogged over, grabbed the ball, walked out into LF until he could see us, and then tossed the ball up.

Thanks, Jeff!

Mere minutes later, something crazy happened. Shawn Kelley spotted us up above the hand-operated scoreboard and came over to toss us a baseball he’d just caught. On his walk over, he caught another ball. When we reached a spot below us on the warning track, he tossed the first baseball to me, and then he tossed the second. I couldn’t believe it. It was one for each
kid. But as I caught the second baseball, a fifty year old guy second ten feet behind us (and completely out of Kelley’s view from down on the field) let out a big gasp, “Aaaahhhhhhh!!!!!” I turned around and looked at him and he explained, “Ah, I totally had that one!”

Kelley clearly was throwing a ball up for Tim and a ball for Kellan, and there was a zero percent chance of him catching the ball, but I figured *what the heck* so I turned around and tossed the guy the second baseball. “Thanks, I gotta give this to someone actually.” And then he left the section. It was bizarre. But, whatever, at least he said thanks. A little manners goes a long way.

After the Mariners finished hitting, we met up with my dad and we scooted around to the LF foul line. We saw the usher who had come to Tim’s rescue the day before with the foul-ball-to-the-hand incident…

…and went over to thank him again for his help. Another usher was standing there and she asked to hear the story. In that last picture, Tim is showing her the bruise on his hand.

Understandably, we were a little nervous about hanging out in the foul ball zone. So we headed down the line closer to third base where it would be less likely that Tim (or any of us) would get beaned by another foul ball. A random Athletic came walking by and signed an autograph for a visiting A’s fan. It was Rich Harden, but for some reason, I didn’t recognize him and had no clue he was at the time. After he signed a baseball for Tim, I asked if he’s pose for a picture with the boys. Right when I trained the camera on them, someone hit a bouncer that landed right behind Harden and the boys:

Harden had no clue the ball was coming. At the last second, I reached out with my bare left hand and the ball clanked right off of my palm and rolled further down the warning track.
Harden gave me a *holy cow* look, paused for the picture, and retreated so he wouldn’t get hit by the next foul ball.

We continued on our way. Down to home plate and around to the Mariners dugout we went. Steve Delabar was hanging out on the stairs of the Mariners dugout signing autographs….

…so we worked our way through the little line that had formed got ourselves our very own Delabar autograph.

And then we headed down the RF line:

We were hanging out behind a little screen set up on the edge of the grass. An A’s coach was fungoing grounders to several A’s first basemen. He was hitting hard shots that required the guys to dive toward the foul line. Several of them snuck by the fielders and game to a rest by the screen behind which we were hiding. Two groundskeepers were standing on the warning track a little further down the line toward Mariners dugout…

…one of them walked over and grabbed one of the baseballs that had been fungo’d down the line, and came over and handed it to Kellan. Kellan was like, “Hey, thanks, man” as he sat in my arms clutching his new baseball.

So, BP was pretty crazy for us. We moved around a lot and had come away with five baseballs. BP was still going strong, but we decided it was time to track down some 2011 Mariners
pocket schedules. None of the concession stands had them. So we head over to the fan assistance office, which is right next to the First Aid room we had visited the day before.

Sometimes teams are out of pocket schedules at the end of the season so I wasn’t sure if we’d have any luck. As we approached the window, I didn’t see any pocket scheduled out on display. When I asked the lady if she had any pocket schedules, she looked left and right, stood up, walked to the back of the room, reached into a small cardboard box, pulled something out and handed me this:

Tons and tons of Felix Hernandez 2011 pocket schedules! (And that’s the Delabar autographed baseball included to give perspective of how many schedules we received.)

Tim posed with one of his schedules and Shelly in front of the big bat art thingy hanging above the main entrance rotunda (which is just to the right of the fan assistance office):

And then I took Tim’s picture in front of the First Aid station we’d visited the day before:

Just then, a Mariners employee walked by on her way into the fan assistance office and asked if I wanted her to take a picture of all three of us. Thanked her but declined the offer explaining that I was just taking the picture because Tim had visited the First Aid office the day before. She asked what happened and, after hearing the story, announced that she had something that might make him feel better. We headed back into the fan assistance office and she disappeared into the back office area. When she returned, she presented Tim with a Felix Hernandez bobblehead!

Thanks!

New prizes in hand, we headed back to the field. The A’s were still taking BP. We met up with my dad in CF.

There is a little break outfield seats in deep RCF – its like a little tunnel for groundskeepers to access the tunnel under the seats. My dad was in the front row on the RF side of the tunnel. Tim, Kellan and I went to the corner spot on the CF side of the tunnel.

Over the next ten minutes, Tim got two new souvenirs. First, A’s September call-up Graham Godfrey tossed us a near-pristine Angels 50th Anniversary Commemorative baseball…

…and an usher named Tim gave both Tim and Kellan each a big back of baseball cards (both featuring an Ichiro card)!

And that was it for BP. As the A’s cleared the field, we sat around in the seats and ate some snacks:

Soon, my lovely wife…

…and mom arrived for the game.

I grabbed a big batch of fries with the tastiest garlic dipping sauce and we reported to our seats in section 109:

I knew this game had the possibility of being a tough one. The A’s had Trevor Cahill on the mound, and (despite his unimpressive 2011 ERA and W-L record) he’s a quality pitcher. Unfortunately, he had his *a game* on this day, and Mariners starter Blake Beavan did not. The A’s scored three runs in the top of the first inning – on a 3-Run homer by Josh Willingham. And that is all the A’s needed to win the game.

The Mariners offensive highlight of the day was Ichiro’s first at bat:

He watched that pitch, but then slapped a single for his 184th and final hit of the 2011 season. I don’t think any other major leaguer would be disappointed with a 184 hit total, but it was sad see Ichiro fall short of 200-hits for the first time in his MLB career. Hopefully he’ll bounce back and top 200 hits and a .300+ average again in 2012.

I had noticed this the night before, but not photographed the new “Dave Niehaus 1977-2010” sign that was added above the TV press box:

In the second inning, this camera man…

…knelt next to me for about 10 minutes with his camera trained on Tim and Kellan. I have no clue if the boys were actually on TV. But the guy was there so long it was almost uncomfortable. I mean, how are you supposed to act when a guy has a camera on you like that for 10 minutes?

As the Mariners were giving up two more runs in the top of the third (to make it 5-0 A’s), we enjoyed some nachos:

In the middle innings, Colleen and I visited the team store to do a little shopping. On the way, we wandered through the Mariners Hall of Fame area behind the 3B concourse. The M’s Hall of Fame is nothing compared to the Reds super-impressive Hall of Fame, but it has some really cool stuff in on display. Here are a few of them.

The bat Ichiro used to set the new all-time Mariners career hits record in April 2011:

For the second season in a row, we decided to end our season at Safeco Field with our Mariners taking on the Oakland Athletics. The first game of the series as September 26, 2011. The crew on hand would be Colleen, Tim, Kellan, my mom, my dad and me. The night started earlier for my dad, Tim, Kellan and me. We headed down early for BP, and Colleen and my mom joined us.

It is old news at Safeco Field, it was my and the boys’ first time checking out the *new* “The Pen” area at Safeco Field. It is on the field level in straight away center field (below what would otherwise be called the *field level* concourse) and it opens 2.5 hours early. The rest of the ballpark opens 2 hours early. I think it is a great move by the Mariners because in years past, Mariners fans only got to see about 5 minutes of Mariners BP when the whole stadium opened only 2 hours early.

We entered the ballpark through the LF bullpen level entrance and made our way to the singles patio (SRO area) directly over the CF wall. We parked Kellan’s little stroller at the back of the patio and my dad held him. I don’t have any pictures or video to show it, but within moments the four of us were all smiling and waving for the TV camera as the Mariners pre-game show went to commercial. And then we got our game faces on. My Dad and Kellan went right on the wall to watch the Mariners hit. Tim and I hung
out behind the TV camera well for a few minutes, but then we relocated behind the Mariners bullpen.

Almost immediately after we reached the Mariners bullpen, my dad and Kellan walked over to meet us and my dad pulled a baseball out of his glove to show me. “I caught it on the fly!,” he announced with a smile. I was excited because on the drive to the ballpark we had discussed catching BP homers on the fly, and my dad said he’d never caught one at Safeco Field. Very cool.

Then it dawned on me: he caught a BP home on the fly WHILE HOLDING KELLAN! WOW! I wish I would have seen it. It must have been incredibly awesome. FYI, he explained that he was a ball that barely cleared the wall and required my Dad to reach down over the railing to grab it.

Like two seconds later, a Mariners employee walked by and handed Tim our first baseball of the day. She explained that it was Shawn Kelley’s warm up ball. That is pretty
cool.

Oh, by the way, we entered this game with 96 total baseballs on the season. I truly never thought we would ever in our lives get 100 baseballs in a season. But with 3 more (after the Shawn Kelley ball from the Mariners employee) we would reach the amazing milestone.

Anyway, my dad handed Kellan off to me right as the rest of the ballpark opened. My dad headed to the seats in CF (just to the RF side of the batters’ eye) and Tim, Kellan and I headed to section 106 in RF. Intentionally set up shop behind Michael Pineda (because he is awesome)…

…and before long, guess what happened?

I’ll give you a hint: it looked sort of like this:

That’s right. I caught a BP homer on the fly WHILE HOLDING KELLAN!!!

Kellan was having quite a day!

It felt awesome! When I made the grab, I immediately held my glove high over my head in victory! A couple fans cheer for the catch. And best of all, Pineda gave me a celebratory fist pump! With my glove still held aloft, I turned toward CF and *showed* the catch to my dad (who can be seen under the little yellow arrow two photos above).

The three of us should have stayed put, but instead we headed over toward RCF to chat with my dad. When I looked back to the spot where I caught the homer, another guy caught another homerun standing in the exact same spot! Ah, well. One homer on the fly with Kellan was good enough for me.

Soon, the Mariners cleared the field and the A’s pitchers came out to play catch down the LF line. We decided to walk all the way around the ballpark around the RF foul pole, toward home plate (where Tim got his picture with this big Ichiro baseball card)…

…and down the 3B/LF foul concourse. Eventually, we cut through the seats and diagonaled through some sections trying to make our quickest route to the railing above the A’s pitchers. As we cut through the last full section before reaching corner, an A’s batter hit a line drive that landed right in the middle of the section about four rows below us. A bunch of fan scrabbled for it as Kellan, Tim and I continued on toward the railing. But as we reached the last seat in the
section, I looked down and the baseball popped out at us.

That was pretty crazy. We had been trying to get one of these baseballs all season. We had actually gotten 5 baseballs from the Angels this season, but all 5 were normal ROMLBs.

Even crazier, that was our 99th baseball of the season. I could not believe it – one more and we would reach the 100 baseball plateau!

But No. 100 would not be all fun and games. Things were about to get scary.

We made it to the railing right above the A’s pitchers. I was holding Kellan in my left arm. Tim was standing to my left with his hand on the railing. Just then, I noticed a fellow-MLBlogger, Wayne Peck, about 10-15 rows below us. I had never met Wayne before, but we had communicated through our blogs and twitter. When I saw him, I called out his name and he came up to say hi to us.

And then I committed a cardinal sin of BP: I took my eyes off the batter and turned to my right to shake Wayne’s hand as he approached. Right as Wayne and I clasped hands, several of the A’s pitchers yelled, “HEAD’S UP!!!”

I turned back to the field (still holding Kellan in my left hand and with Tim was literally standing leaning against my left hip). I scanned the area and surrounding area and I saw NOTHING! And then…

DIIIIINNNNNNGGGG!

A liner buzzes in and clanks off of the railing. I thought it got all railing at first. But then Tim broke out crying. The ball hit right where his pinky knuckle met the railing. It pinched Tim’s hand really hard against the railing and bounced onto the field. I knelt down to comfort him and look at his hand (still holding Kellan). It was a little bit red and obviously hurt a lot. I turned to start taking him out of there when this guy arrived on the scene:

I cannot remember his name…it was something unique. By the way, those pictures are from the following day when we visited the scene of the accident. Anyway, this guy came to our aid and led us to the First Aid office. Now, get this, as we walk out of the section with the usher leading the way, an A’s pitcher (I have no clue who) called out to me and tossed me the baseball that had just smashed Tim’s hand.

The little meany was both our 100th baseball of the season and another Angels 50th Anniversary commemorative.

I truly couldn’t believe it. Who gets a milestone baseball with this kind of crazy story behind it? Just Tim, I guess!

Anyway, we were ushered off to the First Aid room. With Tim still whimpering in pain, the walk to the First Aid room was like torture. Kellan started feeling like he weighed 200 pounds and I couldn’t do much to comfort Tim while holding him. I quickly called my dad and told him where to come meet us with Kellan’s stroller.

As they started checking out Tim’s hand…

…my dad and Wayne both arrived at the First Aid office to check on Tim. I handed Kellan off to my dad so I could talk to the first aid people. Tim’s hand puffy and red. But I think we were pretty lucky. I’m pretty sure it was more of a glancing blow getting some of the meat of Tim’s hand and a lot of the railing.

The first aid people were very nice. They gave me some advice about what to do for Tim’s hand and they gave Tim an ice pack for now and one for later. They told me that I might want to go get an x-ray the next day if it kept bothering Tim.

Then the First Aid guys did a little whispering and the bearded-usher left. He reappeared a few minutes later with a you-just-got-drilled-with-a-BP-foul-ball prize pack for Tim. It included a Felix Hernandez t-shirt, a funny M’s hat that Tim loved, a pennant for Tim to color with crayons, and, most notably, a baseball that the usher had run down and got from the Mariners dugout. You know, it is an odd way to get a baseball at a game, but since Tim had to endure a lot of pain to get it, we counted it! No. 101 for the season.

As the usher handed removed it from the bag and handed it to Tim, I said, “Don’t’ let this be an incentive to get hit by any more baseballs!”

So, yeah, it was a crazy and scary situation. I hate thinking about what could have happened. In the end, I made a big mistake in not waiting to watch the pitch before turning to shake Wayne’s hand. It could have plunked any of us square in the head. So we have to be thankful that it was just a minor injury. Tim took it like a champ and handled the bad situation really well.

Big thanks to the usher and First Aid people. And to Wayne for coming and checking on Tim, very cool.

Anyway, we eventually made our way back out to the field. Tim had been hit right at the beginning of A’s BP so they were still hitting when we got back to the field. Tim was
understandably scared and did not want to go down by the field. So Tim, Kellan and I grabbed some seats toward the back of one of the sections on the 3B side…

…while my dad and Wayne went back to the LF corner.

As Tim iced his hand, we checked out more goodies in his goody bag. There were baseball cards and some posters (one for Tim and one for Kellan) featuring Justin Smoak. Tim was super excited that the posters were *autographed* (they were not real autographs, but part of the poster).

After a little while, we decided to go to the very back of the seats in CF…high enough up that we did not think any baseballs would be able to reach Tim. One our way out there, we got a picture with the Mariners Moose…

…and with the new (and really cool) Dave Niehaus statue:

Here are my boys hanging out with their grandpa in row 34 out in CF:

We were, indeed, high enough up in the seats that nothing came even remotely near us.

Once BP ended, we headed off to the play area where both boys had a lot of fun:

Finally, just before game time, we headed back down to “The Pen” where we eventually met up…

…with Colleen and my mom. Check out that cool seating area in The Pen! I have never seen open flames in a public area of a MLB ballpark. Very cool, Mariners.

While we were in The Pen, we stopped by and said hello (once again) and got a picture with Wayne (and his wicked awesome Big League Chew t-shirt!):

And then we grabbed some delicious nachos and reported to our seats in section 108:

Tim and Kellan cannot get enough of their grandma and grandpa. They always have a blast hanging out with them at a Mariners game:

Here was our outstanding view from the second row of section 108:

We were hoping to witness Kellan’s first Mariners win of his life and Tim and I were trying to break a nasty 10‑game Mariners losing streak dating back to last season. The game did not start out ideally. With Jason Vargas on the hill, Jemile Weeks led off with a double, he advanced to 3B on a groundout by Coco Crisp, and then scored on a single by Hideki Matsui.

While the Marines batted in the first inning, I noticed a familiar face patrolling RF for the A’s:

It was Michael Taylor, who played AA-ball for the Reading Phillies a couple years ago. We saw him play as an R-Phil and he could definitely put on a show with the bat. He got heckled mercilessly during this game by a four fans about 2-3 rows directly behind us. Thankfully they kept it clean while having a whole lot of fun at Taylor’s expense.

Of course, our view in the top of each inning was a bit better — we were right behind Ichiro:

In the second inning, we got a great picture of Tim with our Angels 50th Anniversary commemorative baseballs and the Safeco Field clock/sign for the myGameBalls.com photo scavenger hunt:

After helping me and his grandpa catch those BP homers before the game, Kellan was all set to catch a game homerun of his own:

The boys had lots of fun getting their mommy into the Mariners spirit too:

Early in the game, my cousin Nathan texted to let me know that my other cousin (and his sister) Annie was at the game in my parents’ normal seats on the 3B side. My mom and Colleen headed off to the team store to do some shopping (or browsing at least) and Kellan and I headed off to see Annie. On our way, Kellan and I stopped off at the Mariners bullpen to what was going on…and I got this cool picture of Kellan sitting on the SRO counter:

The last time we saw Kellan was just a few days after Kellan was born. It was great seeing her again. Happily, we successfully turned our backs to the field for this picture…

…without getting nailed in the backs of our heads with a foul ball.

There was, however, a pretty amazing foul ball when we were chatting with Annie. A’s first basement Chris Carter became only the second (or maybe third) person ever to hit a foul ball over one of the structural arches in Safeco Field’s roof. It looked a little like this:

Carter’s foul landed in the staircase at the OF side of the 3B dugout and bounced incredibly high off of the cement before a lucky fan won the jump ball for it.

After spending an inning or so with Annie and her friend, Kellan and I headed back toward our seats…but, once again, we stopped off at the Mariners bullpen. This time, we ended up chatting briefly with Cook & Son Hall of Famer Jason Phillips. I had not seen Phillips during BP, but he mentioned that he saw me and Kellan catch our homerun during BP. I thought that was pretty cool that he didn’t know we were going to be at the game, but recognized us as we caught the BP homerun.

When we returned to our seats, the score was still 1-0 A’s. Kellan decided to pull out his Justin Smoak poster and take a bunch of hacks like he was at the plate:

And I think Kellan’s practice hacks helped warm up the Mariners bats.

With one out in the bottom of the fifth inning, Miguel Olivo bashed his 19th homerun of the season. It was an impressive shot to LF, and it tied up the game 1-1.

With the game tied up, Tim watched the Mariners up close with grandma’s binoculars:

Jason Vargas was still on the mound for the Mariners and he was looking really strong. And his offensive-minded teammates gave him some additional run support in the bottom of the sixth inning. The inning started very unimpressively, with a swinging strike out by Ichiro and a pop out by Luis Rodriguez. But Dustin Ackley followed Rodriguez with a single. Mike Carp followed Ackley with another single. Then big Justin Smoak stepped to the plate and unleashed a deep blast to RCF:

Party time! With Smoak’s homerun, the Mariners pulled out to a 4-1 lead!

But the 3-run lead gave us little comfort. Tim and I had seen the Mariners let leads slip away multiple times this season.

In the bottom of the seventh inning, I was trying to get another picture of Ichiro just standing around doing nothing in RF. Right as I pressed the button to take the picture, Scott Sizemore hit a shallow fly ball to RF. I captured Ichiro…

…right when he started to break in and to his left to run down the baseball.

There were a lot of empty seats around us. Our actual seats were in the third row, but me and the boys jumped around a lot from the first to the fourth rows. Late in the game, Kellan and I spent a lot of time in the first row where my little No. 51 watched closely the Mariners big No. 51:

Meanwhile, Tim was having tons of fun with his grandma:

And then it was business time…

…the ninth inning arrived. Kellan has been just three sweet outs away from his first Mariners win before just to have it slip away. In Baltimore earlier in the season, the Mariners took a 1-0 lead into the bottom of the 13th inning just to have Brandon League blow the win after Jason Vargas had pitched an incredible game. I understand that I have no control over the Mariners on-field play. But I have felt partially responsible for that loss. It would have been Kellan’s first Mariners win, but Tim and I went to try for an umpire ball and left Kellan and Colleen alone in our seats. I should have been holding Kellan at the very moment that he witnessed his first Mariners win. I think the world knew that and intervened to make sure Kellan experienced his first Mariners win the right way.

Well, it was go time once again. Vargas had once again pitched an absolute gem. He threw eight innings, gave up 5 hits and struck out 10 Athletics. Enter the ninth inning and Brandon League. League has had a great season. That blown save in Baltimore was smack dab in the middle of League’s roughest patch of the season, it was the third of four straight blown saves/losses for League.

Well, League brought the drama with him to the mound. He gave up a lead-off single to Coco Crisp. League then struck out Hideki Matsui, but Crisp stole second and third
in the process. He scored the A’s second run of the game on a ground out by Josh Willingham.

So there we were, just one out away from Kellan’s first Mariners win of his life. But then Scott Sizemore hit a double, bringing the tying run to the plate in the form of Kurt Suzuki.

Things were getting super-tense.

I was holding Kellan tight and hoping for the best. And Suzuki answered our prayers. He jumped on the first pitch and hit a weak grounder Luis Rodriguez at short stop. Rodriguez fired the baseball across the diamond and Justin Smoak’s glove clamped down on the 27th out of the game.

MARINERS WIN! MARINERS WIN!! MARINERS WIN!!!

Oh, yeah, MARINERS WIN! M-A-R-I-N-E-R-S…

…WIN! Yes!

MARINERS WIN!

Here are three happy Mariners fans basking in the glory of this historic MARINERS W-I-N:

And it was a historic game. It was Kellan’s first win, it snapped a 10-game Mariners losing streak for me and Tim, my dad and I both caught BP homers on the fly while holding Kellan, and we caught (well, sorta) our 100th baseball of the season. Historic!

We marked the occasion with a family picture:

And a picture with the Ichi-Meter (and Ichi-Meter lady):

By the way, the 183r of those Ichiro hits occurred in the seventh inning of this game.

On the way out of the ballpark, Tim got his picture with Ichiro (and Shelly):

2010 was a long and fun season. And, on October 3, 2010, we headed down to Safeco Field for the final game of our and the Mariners 2010 season.

The line-up was Tim, Kellan, Colleen, my folks, my buddy Paul, and me. Although Paul joined us late, the rest of us headed down for non-existent batting practice.

We headed into Safeco Field and found ourselves in the standing room area in center field. Nothing was going on yet. So we just hung out for a few minutes. We were ready for some good old-fashioned Mariners fun:

Soon, a couple Cook & Son Hall of Famers made their way out to the bullpen: Jason Phillips to the left…

…and finale starting pitcher, Ryan Rowland-Smith, to the right. After a tough season where we never got to see him pitch live, I was excited for the opportunity to watch Ryan close out the 2010 season with a strong final outing.

The Mariners braodcasters do their pregame show from the centerfield standing room area. After Tim hopped from my shoulders to grandpa’s shoulders, Kellan and I strolled over to watch the broadcasters preparing for their show. All of a sudden, I saw a familiar face and, before I knew it, Mariners General Manager Jack Zduriencik…

…was kissing Kellan like a campaigning politician.

Despite the terribly disappointing season, I believe in Jack. I think he has a good vision for the team. And as GM’s go, Jack is the most visible the Mariners have ever had. In two seasons, we’ve met him several times — like last season on the streets of Boston.

After saying hello to Jack Z., we watched Ryan Rowland-Smith warm up among a sea of mascots:

Across the field from RRS, opposing starter Dallas Braden warmed up for the A’s.

My folks and Tim stayed in the outfield when Colleen, Kellan and I headed toward the Mariners dugout. As we walked through the seats behind first base, we watched as the Mariners Moose jacked a homerun to win the mascot homerun derby…

I had a goal of getting either Luke French (Kellan’s first pitcher) or Rajai Davis (his first batter) to sign the picture of Kellan’s first pitch. We hung out behind the Mariners dugout watching for French…

…but we never found him. So instead, we just had another fan take our picture.

Eventually, a bunch of Mariners came out and started playing catch and stretching down the 1B line…

….you can see them in the background of this picture my parents took of some of the mascots.

When some of the Mariners started playing catch, I gave up on finding Luke French and we headed over by the guys who were playing catch. Two games ago, Greg Halman had tossed Tim and me his pregame warmup baseball. That day, we were practically the only people watching the players playing catch. But on this day, the seats were crowded. We were about six rows back and the first three rows were packed. I was hoping we could get one more baseball this season and this was our chance, but there was a lot of competition and the odds weren’t looking good.

As the players started heading back to the dugout a ball or two got tossed to fans in the first row. Finally, Halman and his partner finished playing catch and Halman ended up with the baseball. He looked over to the crowd and I yelled, “Hey, Greg!!!!” I was the only one to call out to him by name and he appreciated it. He scanned around and found me and then tossed his baseball high over everyone else so they couldn’t intercept it on its way to me and Kellan.

The baseball was just a bit over my head level. As I reached up to make the easy grab, Colleen yelled “No! NO!!!!” She was scared I would miss the ball and it would hit Kellan. It was pretty funny, really. Her maternal instincts to protect our baby overrode her common sense about my abilities to catch a baseball lobbed to me.

The expression on Kellan’s face in this picture illustrates how difficult the catch was for me:

Yep, it was pretty routine. (That’s a yawn, by the way).

Thanks, Greg!

The Mariners cleared out and we never found Luke French. But when I looked over toward LF, I saw Kellan’s first batter stretching and preparing for the game. So we headed over there:

In that last picture, Rajai Davis is the guy bending down and reaching toward the ground.

As we waited to see if Davis would come over to sign autographs on his way back to the dugout, we watched this guy…

…walk down the fence and explain to everyone in the front row that they will be kicked out of the game if they interfere with a live ball in play. His message was simple, “Foul grounders are fair game, but catching a fair grounder will get you ejected.

When Davis finished streching, he jogged straight into the A’s dugout. No first batter autograph for Kellan on this day. But don’t fret. We’ll track down Rajai Davis some day. You can mark my words on that.

Rajai Davis wasn’t the only A’s player walking straight lines, but not all of them were heading to the dugout. After warming up in the bullpen, Dallas Braden exited the bullpen gate and walked in a laser straight line directly to us. As I watched him approach, he displayed an odd expressionless face with his harms hanging unnaturally still as he walked…as I said…directly to us. Confused, I looked at him standing two feet in front of me. What’s going on here, I thought to myself.

Then Braden extended his arm, opened his glove, nodded to me to reach in and remove…

…this baseball from the pocket of his glove. Although it took me hundreds of games, it took Kellan only two games to get a baseball from a pitcher with a perfect game on his resume.

Thanks, Dallas!

With no first pitch autographs, but two new baseballs in our pockets, we reported to our seats along the first base line. My mom took a picture of us (Paul was still en route to the ballpark):

We were ready for some Mariners baseball!

At exactly 1:11 p.m., Ryan Rowland-Smith delivered the first pitch of the game…

…for ball 1. However, if you click on that picture to enlarge it, the pitch looks pretty good to me. Davis ended up leading off the game with a single. RRS’s body language wasn’t looking good after the single. He sort of looked like, “Oh, no. Here we go again.”

Kellan was ready to see some quality Mariners baseball…

…after a 9-0 shut out loss in his MLB debut game.

Despite the early frustrated body language, it seemed like RRS started believing in himself. And he should have because he had a good day. After RRS induced a fly out to CF for the first out of the game, Josh Bard threw out Davis trying to steal second. Then RRS struck out Jack Cust to end the first.

Yep, RRS was looking good…

…and he had one scoreless inning in the book.

As each Mariner came to bat for the first time, a picture drawn by a kid was displayed on the big screen. Here are all nine of the M’s batters:

Franklin Gutierrez took a couple mighty looking hacks in the bottom of the first…

…but both he and the Mariners came up empty handed.

Hey, guess who showed up? It was Paulie!

Paulie, Tim and I had big plans for this game. We bought tickets to this game at the very beginning of the season figuring that it would probably be Griffey’s final game. We were hoping to see Griffey’s final homerun and Griff getting carried off the field and into retirement. Sadly, we were Griffeyless on this day.

The A’s ended up scoring two runs off of RRS. They got one run in the third when Mark Ellis doubled to score Rajai Davis. In the fourth, Kurt Suzuki hit a lead off homerun to make it 2-0 A’s.

To this point, the A’s had scored 11 runs to the Mariners zero runs so far in Kellan’s first two games. It was high time for the Mariners to get on the board for Kellan.

Michael Saunders led off the bottom of the fifth with a single. Our buddy Greg Halman…

…followed Saunders with a single of his own on this swing.

Two batters and two outs later, Saunders was erased, Halman stood on second base, and Matt Mangini occupied first as Ichiro came to the plate. In the hands down most exciting moment of Kellan’s young Marienrs fan career, Ichiro lined a double down the RF line on this swing…

…and Halman and Mangini scored Kellan’s first two Mariners runs ever. We were all on our feet screaming and cheering. It was a great moment.

After Ichi’s 2RBI double, the Ichi-Meter was changed to record Ichi’s 213th hit of 2010:

So the score was all knotted up at 2-2. I was excited for the possibility of Kellan witnessing his first Mariners win and RRS finishing off the season with a long-awaited second win of the season.

The excitement was contagious. Tim and Paul had to practice some fist bumps:

And of course Tim had to get in some playing-with-Grandma time:

With the Mariners on the board, Kellan sat up and took notice:

He was ready for the possibility of a personally historical moment — his first ever Mariners lead??

My little family bunched together and cheered like crazy for a Mariners rally:

I had to get a picture with my big boy and teammate:

And, of course, we had to celebrate the day with the season’s final ice cream helmet:

Unfortunately, after Ichiro’s double, the rally ceased. And after five innings, both teams went to their bullpens.

It should be noted that RRS actually had a slightly better line than Dallas Braden. Both pitched 5 innings and gave up 2 earned runs. But RRS gave up only 4 hits to Braden’s 5 hits, and he struck out 3 to Braden’s 2. They both walked 1 batter.

Sadly, the Mariners bullpen turned Braden into a winner-in-absentia. After Braden left the game knotted 2-2, Mariners reliever Anthony Varvaro promptly gave up a run on two hits in the top of the sixth. He would pitch only one-third of an inning.

In the 8th inning, Garrett Olson gave up a homerun to Kevin Kouzmanoff. That made the score 4-2 A’s.

In the bottom of the 8th inning, Ichiro notched his 214th and final hit of the 2010 campaign:

He then stole his 42nd and final base of the season. He wound up on third base on a Jose Lopez groundout. Finally, Ichiro scored his 74th and final run of the season on a Justin Smoak line drive single to left field.

Sadly, Ichiro’s run would be the final Mariners run to be pushed across the plate in 2010. We lost our 101st game of the season, and 2nd of Kellan’s life, by a final score of 4-3.

Toward the end of the game, I snapped a picture of the Mariners mlb.com beat writer, Jim Street (in the OU hat):

Jim was closing out the final game of his career…although I recently read that he is only “semi-retired” so maybe we’ll still see him on mlb.com from time-to-time.

After the game, we got a final family-at-the-ballpark picture…

…and a final TJCs and Paulie picture:

It was so sad that our season was over so soon and that, as we exited the gates at Safeco Field, we would be entering a period of six months without (regular season) Mariners baseball.

I snapped one more panorama for 2010 on our walk to the CF gates:

In doing so, I noticed that the hand operated scoreboard was already set up for the 2011 home opener:

On September 12, 2006, we celebrated the first “First Gamers Club.” The guests of honor (the “First Gamers”) were Tim, Julie (my cousin Janet’s daughter), Laura (my cousin Daniel’s daughter), and Kasey (our family friends’ grandson). With the exception of Laura, all of the 2006 First Gamers would be in attendance for the second First Gamers Club celebration.

This time, the guests of honor would be Kellan, Gill and Kate (Kellan’s and Tim’s only first cousins (my sister-in-law Kimberly’s and brother-in-law Kevin’s kids)), and Tyler and Erika (my cousin Janet’s 3-year-old twins).

Thanks to my wonderful parents, Tim’s first game was in Suite 5 at Safeco Field (the Ted Williams suite). Thanks again to my wonderful parents, Kellan’s first game would also be in Suite 5 at Safeco Field. Here is Kellan’s extremely cool first game ticket:

We arrived right when the gates opened. As we slowly made our way from the parking garage, through the suite level concourse and down to the field level, several ushers gave Tim and Kellan some baseball cards, including these two absolute keepers:

It was quite the chore to keep Tim from playing with (and thereby destroying) his Felix and Griffey cards during the game. He was very excited about them. I kept them safe and let him play with (and destroy) several less important cards he also received from ushers during BP.

When we made it to the field level, Tim and Colleen headed to the team store where Tim got some cool Mariners athetlic shorts (pictured throughout this entry) and Kellan and I reported directly to the RF foul line to watch BP.

This is the first picture ever of Kellan at Safeco Field (or any MLB stadium):

When we arrived at the field, my mom, dad and brother had already hung the First Gamers Club sign from our suite:

By the way, the “M” in “GAMERS” looks different because I painted silver sparkles over the black paint of the “M.”

According to the time coding on my camera, it took exactly 11 minutes until A’s 30-year old, first time September call-up, Bobby Cramer, bestowed upon Kellan the very first MLB baseball of his life:

Here is a cellphone picture I took so I could immediately show off Kellan’s prize:

Bobby Cramer was very nice. We chatted a little bit during BP and he agreed to sign Kellan’s first baseball after the conclusion of BP.

After hitting the team store, Tim and Colleen met up with us and Colleen took this picture of her three guys with Kellan’s first baseball:

Tim was excited for his little brother. He really loves that little guy.

Then, someone took this excellent family picture of the four of us:

That kid in the yellow shirt explained that the Mariners had stamped some of the BP balls with a “CATCH & WIN” stamp. If you caught one of the stamped baseballs, you could turn it in for an autographed Mariners baseball at a prize table in the concourse behind home plate. (I guess I should mention that it was Fan Appreciation Night).

Well, Kellan’s first baseball had the stamp. It is visible in the last couple pictures — it looks like a blue blob on the baseball. As much as I would like to get an autographed Mariners baseball, there was no way in the world that I was going to trade in Kellan’s first baseball.

Soon, more First Gamers showed up. In this picture, Tim is jumping for joy (and sporting his new shorts!) as my dad chats up Tyler and Erika:

Julie is in the pink hat just behind Tim. I got a kick out of the fact that Tim and Julie shared their first game together back in September 2006. Now, just over four years later, Julie was enjoying her second baseball game while Tim was taking in his EIGHTY-SECOND game!

Eventually, my dad was able to secure a couple baseballs for Julie, Erika and Tyler:

I believe that both of those baseballs also came courtesy of Bobby Cramer.

Soon, Kimberly, Kevin, Gill and Kate also made their way down to join us for some BP. Colleen and Kimberly took this nice “sisters” shot…

…that features the First Gamers Club sign in the background.

True to his word, the second BP ended, Bobby Cramer ran over and signed Kellan’s first baseball:

Note that Bobby is using the Cook & Son tried-and-true baseball glove hat method while signing Kellan’s baseball. Kellan’s first baseball is pictured below. I am extremely happy with it. Bobby did an excellent job with his autograph. The placement of his autograph and his jersey number (“64″) off-set to the side of the “CATCH & WIN” stamp and a nice grass/dirt smudge easily make it one of the most visually unique and pleasing baseballs in our collection.

Even if Bobby doesn’t turn out to be an all-star player, he can rest assured that he will always be remembered by the Cook family.

Thanks, Bobby!

BP was great fun with all of the kids. The only regret was that I had not been able to get a baseball for Gill and Kate. I’d once given Gill a baseball Gil Meche used to do some rehab work at old Yankee Stadium, so they had a real MLB baseball already. But I was determined that Gill should get one at his first game. At this point, I wasn’t sure how or if that was going to happen.

Before leaving our BP spot, I had to pose for a picture with Tim in his familiar shoulder riding position and Kellan in his baby bjorn:

In that picture, you can see the “CATCH & WIN” logo on the big screen behind us.

After BP ended, Tim headed up to the suite with his Grandma. Meanwhile, Kellan, Colleen and I headed over to the Mariners dugout. I really wanted to get a picture of Kellan with a Mariner at his first game. I had discussed it with Ryan Rowland-Smith at our last game and he said he’d gladly pose for a picture with us and that we should come over by the dugout. So that’s what we did.

Kellan took a little power nap:

And he concentrated hard on taking “it” all in while he was awake:

When Colleen split off from us to go fetch Kellan’s pacifier, a nice fan asked if I wanted him to take our picture. Hey, why not? Right? So here it is:

No Mariners were in sight for a long time. Then, John Wetteland came out and started signing autographs down the foul line. A couple rookie calls up soon joined him. We stuck by the dugout looking for RRS. Eventually, he came out and we locked eyes. I pointed down the foul line and we both nodded our heads. But when he went down the line to meet up with us, a throng of fans rushed him for autographs. Then more players came out and joined the huge autograph session.

We moved down the line a bit and waited for people to clear out from the RRS line. In this picture, Kellan looks like a pro-autograph hound as RRS signs an autograph for another fan in the background:

We ended up getting pictures with four Mariners:

Clockwise from top left: David Pauley, RRS, Chris Seddon, and Garrett Olson.

Olson posed for a picture with us and then saw the little helmet in my hand. He grabbed the helmet, put it on Kellan’s head, and leaned in for a second picture. Excellent move, Garrett!

I got a bright idea earlier in the day, I brought Tim’s ice cream helmet from the last game and a metallic-silver pen and got the guys to autograph it:

A couple of the autographs are on the far side near the back. On the bill of the helmet, those autographs are Cook & Son Hall of Famers Jason Phillips and Ryan Rowland-Smith.

Phillips wasn’t autographing down the line. While the autograph session was going on down the line, he was out in the bullpen and outfield working with starting pitcher Luke French and catcher Josh Bard. After we got those player pictures above, it was getting close to game time. We still had not visited the suite yet. But before heading up, I told Colleen we needed to go out to the bullpen because I wanted to say hi to Jason.

We found Phillips pretty quickly. He came over to chat and meet Kellan. And he asked, “Hey, where’s the big guy?” Yep, Tim has graduated from being our “little boy” to being our “big guy.”

Jason Phillips has been so incredibly cool to Tim and I over the past two seasons. I definitely don’t want to try to take advantage of the relationship. But this was Kellan’s first game! So I had to ask if he could hook Kellan up with his first Mariners baseball. “Of course,” was Jason’s response.

Thank you, Jason!!!

Faced with a fresh, new-to-the-world Mariners fan, Jason told us a story about when his kid was born and he was just days away from the start of a baseball season. When we parted ways, we wished each other well for the offseason. By the way, the baseball Jason gave to Kellan was fresh out of the box. It is a beautiful clean pearl of a baseball.

Here is a look at Kellan’s first two baseballs:

Wait, that’s three baseballs? To the left, that is Kellan’s absolutely beautiful Bobby Cramer autographed, “CATCH & WIN” stamped first baseball. The baseball on the right (“107″) is the baseball from Jason Phillips. (FYI, I internally debated with myself long and hard about whether we should start again at “1” now that Kellan has joined our little baseball team. I’m still not convinced I made the right decision, but I decided that we’d just keep on with our existing numbering system under the theory that all of the baseballs are collectively “Cook & Son” team baseballs. Right or wrong, I’ll live with that decision until the boys are old enough that I’m no longer “cool” and they feel the need to have their own separate numbering system. Hopefully that’s in the distant future because I love being on my sons’ team.)

Anyway, what about that middle baseball? We wandered by the prize booth. I showed them Kellan’s baseball (now autographed by Bobby Cramer) and told them there was no way I was going to give it to them, but that we still would like to get an autographed Mariners baseball. They put a little red dot inside the “C” in of the “CATCH & WIN” stamp and let me pick a bag from the autographed baseball grab bag. Truth be told, I like that red dot a lot. It adds to the story of Kellan’s first baseball and it looks cool. Anyway, Colleen and I both pointed to the same grab bag, and we ended up pulling the above-pictured Jose Lopez autographed baseball. We like Jose. The Jose baseball is definitely a welcome addition to our home.

Okay — it was game time. We reported to the suite and said our hellos to the gathered crowd of family and friends.

I absolutely love Tim’s “first pitch” picture. So, in addition to myself, I assigned two other people to photograph Kellan’s first pitch. One took the shot too early and one took it too late. Luckily, I took it at just the right time and Kellan is now the proud owner of a framed picture of the first pitch of his first Mariners game. Here it is:

If you cannot tell, the baseball can be seen in the foul grass on the 3B side, just to the right of the circle of dirt around home plate (click to enlarge the picture and you’ll be able to see it). Just like Tim’s first pitch thrown by Gil Meche, Kellan’s first pitch thrown by Luke French was a called “strike one.”

On the second pitch, Rajai Davis popped out to…

…Ichiro in right field for the first “out” of Kellan’s career as a Mariners fan.

After that second pitch, sadly, it was all downhill for the Mariners. The next batter hit a homerun and the A’s never looked back.

But lets dwell on the positive. Here was our beautiful view from Suite 5 at Safeco Field:

When you attend a game in a luxury suite, its easy to end up not hanging on every pitch of the game. There is a lot that goes on in a suite. And my mom and Colleen did an excellent job snapping pictures of all of the fun.

In no particular order, lets check in on the fun:

Top left: my dad with my folks’ closest friends and co-Mariners season ticket holders Lynn and Steve. And half-hidden behind Lynn in Kasey from the First Gamers Club class of 2006. Kasey and Tim had a blast together at this game.

Top right: my cousin Annie smiles for a picture with her (and my) uncle Raaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy! Ray is Julie, Erika and Tyler’s grandpa.

My hope was that the Mariners would win. Unfortunately, they were facing Trevor Cahill who was looking to cap off a stellar season with his 18th win to go along with is sub-3.0 ERA. As with all apparent Mariners losses in the making, my second goal was that hopefully at least Ichiro would get a hit. I was poised with my camera ready to capture the moment:

But he walked in the first and, as shown here,…

…grounded into a fielder’s choice in the third.

Back to the suite pictures. In the top left photo below, Katie shares a moment with her (and my) cousin Janet:

Janet, of course, is Raaaaaaaaaaayyy’s daughter, and Julie, Erika and Tyler’s mother.

Top right: My dad holds Kellan as uncle Raaaaaaaaaayyy watches on.

Bottom left: My mom goofs around with Julie.

Bottom right: Katie holds Kellan as they watch the game from the suite’s top row of seats.

By the way, each of my cousins at this game are children of my mom’s sisters, each of my aunts at this game are those very same sisters of my mom (she has four sisters and two of them were at this game), and each of my uncles at this game are the husbands of the aforementioned aunts and fathers of the aforementioned cousins.

Bottom left: Kasey (in his grandma’s arms) pats Kellan (in my dad’s arms) on the arm, while Colleen and I smile for the camera.

Bottom right: Trouble with a capital “T” and “K”. Left to their own devices, I am certain that Tim and Kasey could get into unruly amounts of mischief. (And, for good measure, Kate is hiding under the table).

The Mariners love new fans. They were quick to bestow unto Tim, Kellan, and all of the kids these fancy “first game” certificates:Of course, this wasn’t Tim’s first game, so I digitally edited his certificate.

You know what else they have in suites? Awesome food, and lots of it. Here, my best buddy, Paul, and I point out (with amazement) part of the spread:

Along the wall off-camera to the right, we also had pizzas, hot dogs, and delicious little mini corndogs.

As the Mariners fell further-and-further behind their opponents, we just kept having fun:

Top left and right: Carol plays with Kellan. In the photo on the left, my aunt Margaret watches on in the pink jacket. In a crazy and by all accounts unplanned twist of fate, Carol wore the exact same white sweater and Margaret wore the exact same pink jacket to Tim’s first game. Here is the photographic evidence.

Bottom left: Me and Paulie (taken about two seconds before (or possibly after) our “pointing at the food” picture above).

Bottom right: Tim and one of his favorite people in the whole world, his grandma.

This has been a lot of pictures…well, that’s not even the half of it. Let’s keep going:

Top left: my mom and Kellan.

Top right: the kids gather for some First Gamers Club cake!

Bottom left: I paparazzi-style ambushed my brother Jason as he got up to get more food and/or drink. Paulie laughs at Jason in the process. Back in 1998-99, Jason, Paul and I were roommates during the year after I graduated from college and before I moved to Pennsylvania for law school. Between the three of us, there was a lot of making fun of each other going on in that house. Good times.

Bottom right: Janet watches the game with all three of her kids.

Wait. That was three pictures in a row without Kellan. Here we go, its Kellan and Lynn on the left…

…and Kellan and aunt Kimberly on the right.

And how about some Kellan, mommy and the Safeco Field sign pictures? We got those too:

Like at Tim’s first game, the Mariners Moose paid a visit to the suite and posed for pictures with everyone. Here are just two of the many Moose pictures:

Heck, let’s see a few more:

By this point, all of these people should look familiar except two of ‘em. In the top left, Janet’s husband Destry is holding Erika and Tyler. At the bottom left, Katie and Annie are joined by their dad (and my uncle) Tom in their Moose picture. By the way, to connect the dots, maybe I should mention that Margaret and Tom are the parents and Katie and Annie are the sisters of my cousin Nathan with whom Tim and I went to a Nationals vs. Mets game on September 6, 2010.

Tim and his cousin Kate are about 9 months apart in age (Tim is older) and they have a great time with each other. Here, Tim makes silly faces at my camera…

…while Kate smiles at someone else’s camera.

Meanwhile, Kate’s big brother and Tim’s cousin, Gill, was having fun sitting with his dad (“uncle Kevin”) and playing with the large stack of baseball cards he’d acquired from various ushers throughout the night:

Gill’s baseball fan loyalty is somewhat up in the air. While his dad is a moderate Phillies fan (more of an Eagles and Flyers fan) and his (and Tim’s) grandpa is a Yankees fan, I have designs on drafting Gill into a life of indentured Mariners fanitude.

Tim continued having way too much fun, alternatively, with Kasey and his grandma:

And aunt Kimberly and uncle Kevin couldn’t say enough about their experience at Safeco Field…

…where everyone was “so very nice” to them.

With Kellan’s first game not quite going as planned on the field, there was plenty of time to smile at Kellan…

…or to take “guys” shots with my littlest boy and Paulie…

…and, of course, I had to get a shot with both of my boys…

….with Tim wearing a pair of rabbit ears courtesy of his uncle Jason.

At some point, Gill requested to go to the kids play area. Lynn, Kasey, Tim and I decided to join them. I took this shot from a little concourse that joins the 1B side suite level to the RF suite level:

The play area was pretty crowded and it was easy to lose sight of the kids in there. So we didn’t stay too long. Before we left, I made a suggestion to Kimberly: if they would like, we could stop by the Mariners bullpen and I could try to get a baseball for Gill and Kate before heading back to the suite.

Things worked out ideally. As we approached the bullpen, Garrett Olson was warming up, but for some unknown reason, Jason Phillips wasn’t doing the catching. Instead, Jason was standing behind the catcher just off to the lefthanded batters box side of the plate. He was standing against the fence to the bullpen.

In the picture below to the left…

…you can just barely see a little piece of Jason’s blue baseball cap above the green padding right over Gill’s right hand. As we walked up to the fence, I noticed that Jason was standing right there. I said hello and he turned around to chat.

Again, I don’t like asking Jason for too much, but these were drastic times. Gill and Kate were never going to have another first game. I introduced Jason to everyone, mentioned that they’d flown out to Seattle from the east coast to share their first baseball game with Kellan, and I asked if it was possible for them to get a baseball to mark the occassion. “No problem,” Jason said, “just let him finish warming up so I can get over to my bag.” Above to the right, Gill watched through the fence with wide eyes.

Once Garrett finished warming up, Jason headed over to his equipment bag, pulled out a baseball and tossed it over the fence to uncle Kevin who handed it over to Gill who then gladly handed it over to his sister, Kate.

Thanks, again, Jason!

To celebrate Gill and Kate’s first baseball, the three cousins got ice cream helmets and took them back to the suite:

Ichiro came to the plate for his final at bat of the night in the 8th inning. He was still looking to collect his first hit of the night, and his 211th of the season. And with this swing…

…he extended his hit streak in games attended by Kellan to one (1) game (and counting).

It was getting late and the action in the suite was quieting down a bit. The Martelons enjoyed some more “first game” action from the steps in the suite’s seating area:

The food service people started cleaning up…

…while Colleen and Kellan relaxed in a cushy chair:

Others, including me and Tim, quietly watched the Mariners offense sputter to the finish line of a 9-0, six hit, shutout loss:

The brutal loss, however, couldn’t dampen our spirits. The season was long lost months ago and, while a win would have been great, this night was about family, friends and sharing our five kids’ “first game” experience with one another. And on that front, the night was a smashing success.

After the game concluded, people slowly said their temporary good-byes (we’re all family, we’d see each other again soon):

Paulie pointed out the framed shot of our favorite baseball player of all-time hanging on the wall:

Months earlier, I had hoped and expected that Ken Griffey, Jr. would be playing in this game. Given his retirement, I was at least happy to have him “in” the suite with us.

I didn’t want to leave. I grabbed my “big guy” and we got a picture as the Safeco Field roof rolled shut:

In the name of preserving history, I got a picture of the “unhappy” totals:

Then we got a picture of our whole family:

We try to get a full family shot at least once a year. It was great to get this one at Safeco Field (although poor little Kellan was lights out at this point). Oh, by the way, there is my camera-shy sister-in-law, Alison, between my mom and brother! (With this picture, I am pretty sure I’ve now included at least one picture of each person who attended the game with us in the suite).

Then, I got yet another panorama from the suite (showing the roof closing)…

…and one more picture of my happy little family (the “PA Cooks”):

Aside from the final score, it was an almost unbeatable day at the ballpark.

Tim’s little brother, Kellan, was born in July and there was no way that I was going to allow him to miss out on meeting the Mariners during the first baseball season of his life. And there was no way Kellan was going to experience his first game anywhere but Safeco Field. So, as the season drew to a close, we found ourselves in Seattle.

Kellan’s first game was slated for Friday, October 1, 2010.

But we were in town a couple days early to visit my family and the Mariners were playing. There was no way that Tim and I were gonna miss out. On Thursday, September 30, 2010, we gathered up my mom, dad, and brother Jason, and headed down to Safeco Field.

We had Colleen’s sister’s family in town with us and a lot going on, so we headed down late and missed batting practice. When we arrived, no one was on the field. So, we headed to the play area…

…Tim always enjoys the Safeco Field play area. When he finished up playing, we found the Mariners Moose nearby…

…and posed for a picture with him in his little Moose den.

Next, we figured we better head over to the Mariners dugout to see what was going on with our Mariners. And that’s when we saw one of the prettiest sights we’d seen all season:

Ah, beautiful Safeco Field. We love this place.

Other than Chone Figgins stretching down the RF line, none of the players were on the field. But we did see some of the Mariners top brass…

After a bit, there were a bunch of Mariners warming up down the RF line. Tim and I headed over there…

…and we were essentially the only people around when Greg Halman finished playing catch. I called out, “Hey, Greg!” He turned around and fired the ball to us.

Thanks, Greg!

It was just minutes until game time, so we reported to our seats in RF. We picked RF because the week day crowds had been tiny lately at Safeco Field and we figured our chances of getting near a homerun ball would be decent. Also, as an added bonus, we’d been near Ichiro.

Speaking of Ichiro. Turns out Chuck Armstrong was in the dugout because he was getting ready to present Ichiro with some awards of some sort…

….for being the first Major Leaguer to collect 200 hits for ten straight seasons.

We were pretty busy chatting and generally having a good time during the game, so I did a pretty shabby job at getting action shots. But we’ll do our best to take you through the night.

Here was our crew…an excellent bunch of ballgame companions (note that Tim was busy eating a hot pile of nachos)…

…and here was our view of Ichiro as he played catch with Franklin Gutierrez between innings.

And this was our view of the game from Section 109, Row 25, seats 5-9:

Now is that a great looking ballpark or what? By the way, Row 25 is the third row back from the field in RF at Safeco.

As for the game, it started off nicely. It was the A’s and the Mariners. Doug Fister took on Gio Gonzalez. Both pitchers were “on” at the beginning. Despite some hits by both teams through the early innings (including a first inning single for Ichiro (his 209th hit of the season)), the game was scoreless through four innings.

It was a lot cooler at this game than we were used to while attending games in the northeast. So, a couple innings into the game, my mom, Tim and I visited the M’s team store and I got a great deal on a new Mariners sweatshirt for Tim.

On the way back to our seats, we decided to walk by the Mariners bullpen.

I noticed something interesting, something that I’d never noticed before…

…a little cut out at the front of the M’s bullpen mound with a flat ground pitching rubber. That was a new one on me.

As I stood at the fence starring at my camera’s LCD screen and taking some of the worst and most blurry pictures of all time of Ichiro batting…

It was great to catch up with RRS. It was interesting to chat about what it was like in the clubhouse as the Mariners were 97 losses into the season and four days away from the off-season. It was also cool to get a sneak preview into his very interesting training plans for the off-season. I felt a bit bad seeing RRS watching the game from the bullpen after a tough season. And I was hoping I’d get a chance to see him pitch once more and close out the season on a positive note. While it wouldn’t happen at this game, I would get my chance.

Soon, we headed back to our seats. It was time for a chocolate cihp cookie dough ice cream helmet…

…but as things got sweet for Tim, they got sour for the Mariners.

Between the fifth and sixth innings, Doug Fister gave up 6 runs and Brian Sweeney gave up the seventh run of the game. Quickly, our pitchers’ dual turned ugly.

But after 97 losses, we were used to seeing the M’s trailing their opponent and we were able to still have a good time…

…as we watched the Mariners on the way to their 98th loss of the season. Hey, check out that great new sweatshirt on Tim. Its a zip-up with a teal inner hood. Very nice.

(By the way, I made Tim take off his new sweatshirt and wear his old green sweatshirt to eat his ice cream helmet. That guy is sloppy with the ice cream.)

It was also very nice to be hanging out behind Ichiro:

And, of course, it was nice to get a chance to snap a picture of the Greg Halman ball:.

Speaking of Greg Halman, he made an outstanding diving catch in left field. In fact, it was such a nice, high speed diving catch…

…that he broke his belt in the process.

After Halman’s catch, I figured I should go back over by the bullpen to snap a shot of Halman. While I was there, I also snapped a picture of the Mariners’ mop-headed September call-up, Dan Cortes…

…interestingly, five days later with the season concluded, we were getting ready to board our airplane back to Pennsylvania while Mr. Cortes was getting ready to board his flight back home to the Los Angeles area. (FYI, the white and red arrow is pointing to my brother and parents).

Well, we made it to the 8th inning. It was still 7-0 A’s, and despite fairly empty seats, we’d managed to go the whole game without catching a homerun.

And then, the perfect opportunity arose…and I totally botched it.

With two outs in the top of the 8th inning, Chad Pennington hit a homerun in our direction. I had an open lane to the ailse. It seemed like it was going to land 5-10 rows behind us and right on the aisle. I bolted to the aisle and headed up three rows. Then the ball totally died. I turned around but couldn’t make it back to “the spot.” The spot, sadly, was precisely at the aisle seat…

….in THE ROW IN WHICH I WAS JUST SITTING. It was right there, on my side of the green railing. RIGHT THERE! Had I stayed put, I could have caught it easily.

I still had a chance. Someone bobbled the ball. I made a dive for it down the stairs while passing under that railing, which ultimately resulted in several flesh wounds and two large buises but no baseball.

Aye, aye, aye…

Oh, well. while I really would like to catch a game homerun some day, I would much, much, MUCH prefer that it not be a homerun off of the Mariners.

Anyway, it was moving into the 9th inning. Tim and I decided to head over to the 3B dugout in hopes of getting our hands on our first ever Safeco Field umpire ball.

Here was our first view as Anthony Varvaro pitched to Kevin Kouzmanoff…

…the white arrow is pointing to my brother and parents. We were in the concourse standing room area for that picture.

A few minutes later, we mae it to the first row right on the umpire tunnel, but an usher told us we couldn’t sit in the “charter” seats. I asked her how far back we had to go. Row 11 was acceptable.

So, this was our view from the 11th row of Ichi’s final at bat of the night when,…

…after a hard foul liner right over our heads, he smacked a single for his 210th hit of the season.

After the final out of the game — and an 8-1 loss — home plate umpire Bruce Dreckman handed a beautiful rubbed up baseball to Tim (pictured below). It was the 105th baseball in the “Todd & Tim Baseball Partners Era.” Our next baseball would be our first of the “Todd, Tim & Kellan 3-Man Baseball Team Era.”

It was a miserable loss, but it was great being back at Safeco Field and it was great spending the evening with my family.

On the walk back to my brother and parents in RF, an usher took this excellent shot of me and my boy...

…and then…

…another usher took this excellent shot of all of us.

As we left the park, I was excited to know that we’d be walking back into the park less than 24 hours later for the first game of Kellan’s life!

We woke up in the La Quinta Inn’s “Oakland Airport Coliseum” hotel on the morning of Thursday, June 10, 2010 ready for a Cook Grandfather-Father-Son Baseball Roadtrip first: our second game at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, which would mark the first time we have attended two games at the same stadium during a roadtrip. Once again, we would be seeing the California Angels of Anaheim, Orange County taking on the Oakland Athletics.

We grabbed some free breakfast in the hotel lobby area, showered up, Tim built a very rudimentary fort…

…and we were off to the Coliseum. Once again the La Quinta shuttle (van) dropped us off at the BART stop. Tim loved driving in the van and made sure to tell numerous people that “we drove here in a van!”

The day before, the outside security person hardly glanced into my big green backpack. Today, the guy must have been a former-TSA agent. He poked, prodded, made me remove 70% of the contents, and then decided the backpack was too big to go into the stadium. I’ve take this same backpack everywhere (probably to 20 different stadiums), including THIS same stadium. I told the guy I had brought this same backpack into the Coliseum not 12 hours ago and I crammed it into the little measurement box. Finally, the authority figure relented, “I’ll let you take it in…this time.”

So we were in…

We headed to RF where my dad had noticed a baseball in the gap the night before. I’d brought a rubber band, string, and sharpie with the thought of trying my first ever attempt at the glove trick. The ball was still there. But, I never even rigged up my glove. It would have taken too much effort, I think.

Instead, Tim and I stood in the RF corner right next to the foul pole and watched Jered Weaver play catch with former Mariner Joel Piniero. Weaver was standing right in front of us and, interestingly, he was using two baseballs to play catch. He’d hold one ball in his glove and throw the other. After the throw, he’d transfer the second ball to this throwing hand so he could catch the first ball after Piniero threw it back to him.

Once they finished up their throwing, Weaver tossed one ball into the seats behind him and then turned and tossed the second ball to us.

Thanks, Jered!

After Weaver tossed us the ball, Piniero walked over to the foul line. I called out to Joel and he gave us a wave. I asked if he would take a picture with Tim. He said yes, but first he had to do some running in the OF.

A few minutes later, we got Weaver to autograph the baseball he’d tossed us and pose for a picture with Tim (look for Joel in the background):

I think this is the second time this season that we have gotten a baseball, picture and autograph all from the same player at a game, the first being Billy Wagner, and I think it is really cool. Thinking back, we did this once last season with C&S Hall of Famer Ryan Rowland-Smith. (We also got all three from Jason Phillips last season, but the picture and autograph were at different games).

We moved around the corner to the RF foul seats to get that picture with Weaver. I should mention that this was a 12:35 p.m. day game following a night game. We didn’t think there would be any BP, but we were wrong. The A’s took BP (the Angels did not).

Standing right in front of us in RF was an Oakland Athletic. I had no clue who he is. I don’t bring a roster to games (and if I review a roster before a game it is generally just to see if any former Mariners are on the team). But I have a secret weapon — a Canon PowerShot SX200IS with 12 x optical zoom and (48 x total zoom) — and that often times is all that it takes…

…”Hello, Mr. Brad Ziegler.” (note: the inset zoomed in picture is a different picture than the main picture).

No one else around seemed to know that it was Ziegler. No one had said his name when he’d shagged balls nearby. Once I figured out who it was and he shagged another baseball (about 40-50 feet from the foul line), I called how, “Hey, Brad Zeigler! Zeeeeegs!” That tipped everyone off in the section and when Ziegler looked over EVERYONE (well, not me, Tim or my Dad) started yelling his name. Ziegler looked discouraged by the yelling and started to turn back toward “the bucket.” Just then, Tim called out:

“BALL PLEEEEASE!”

Ziegler quickly swiveled back toward the stands: “Who said “ball please!?” And he started walking toward the seats with the baseball. I pointed at Tim. Then, a kid about 4-5 rows further out in the outfield yelled, “I did!” Ziegler veered to his left and started heading to that little liar kid.

“He did!” I said, as I pointed at Tim. Then some random other guy pointed at Tim and shouted out, “THIS LITTLE KID DID!”

Ziegler changed course again. He approached Tim.

ZIEGLER: “You said ‘ball please’?”

TIM: “Yes.”

Ziegler gives the ball to Tim.

Thanks, Brad! (And thanks to the “random other guy” for the assist).

It was a great lesson for Tim. I told him (and have told him numerous times since then) that he got that baseball because he said “please” and it has had a very powerful impact on Tim. He’s saying please a lot all of a sudden!

Soon, Joel Piniero headed over our way. Do you know about the photo scavenger hunt on mygameballs.com? If not, click here. We’re having fun trying to collect some of the scavenger hunt photos and Joel was kind enough to help us out with a 5-pointer — Tim fist bumping a player:

Yes, Tim’s fist bump is a little unorthodox, but he’s only 4 years old after all. He’s a seasoned high fiver, but his fist bumping still needs some work.

Anyway, it was awesome to see Joel. I really liked him as Mariner and was sad to see him go. He was also kind enough to sign the Brad Ziegler “ball please” ball for Tim…and another baseball for my Dad (but not the one he’d just thrown my Dad the day before).

Ahh…a couple things I forgot to mention:

First, between our Weaver picture and getting the Ziegler baseball, someone hit a high foul pop fly down the 1B line. I ran over a couple seats away from the field and positioned myself for a big bounce over everyone in the first two rows. And I would have got the ball too had it not bounced directly into a 30-year old’ish guy’s nose. The guy was going for the ball and it cleaned his clock. His nose opened up like a faucet. It wasn’t pretty.

Second, while we were waiting for Piniero, an Angel pitcher was throwing off the mound in the bullpen. Two throws into his session, he stopped and told his catcher to turn around and tell one of their teammates (who was playing catch with someone else in the OF) to move because the pitcher thought he might hit his teammate behind the catcher. The Angels mocked him mightily for this request. The best line was when the catcher stopped and told the pitcher ask a fan sitting in the crowd to move so he wouldn’t hit him with his return throws to the mound.

Third, also while we were waiting for Piniero, some fan decked out in Angels gear came down to the bullpen and (with Joel Piniero standing about 30 feet to his right) asked the guys in the bullpen, “Do you know when Joel Piniero is going to be out here?” Everyone said no. Then numerous Angels started asking their teammates really loudly, “Do you know when Joel Piniero is going to be out here?” Everyone said no. Then one of them yells to Joel, “Hey, do you know when Joel Piniero is going to be out here?” Joel looks all around…nope, he had no clue either when Joel Piniero would be out there. This never stopped while we were out there and the guy never figured out that Joel was standing right there.

Okay, after the picture with Joel, we decided to go check out our seats…

…I got us some excellent seats in the first row (well, third row because of the on field seats) in Section 125 by third base. They were looking really nice, except that the fence gave them very little leg room.

Side note, on the way over to our seats, we walked through the rows of empty seats all the way from the RF corner. That’s pretty standard during BP, right? Well, as we circled around home plate we were in about the third row above the dugout when an usher stopped us. After yesterday’s “you gotta eat in your own seats 40 minutes before the game” incident, I was ready for anything. She didn’t dissappoint. She told me we couldn’t walk through the rows. If we wanted to get from Section 120 Row 3 to Section 125 Row 1, we would have to walk up to the cross aisle behind row 20 and walk behind the 99% empty seating sections and then walk down the aisle at section 125. Okay.

Next, we decided to head over to left field. Oddly, there was no one there. Literally, other than an usher, there was no one else in foul territory down the line (which was very odd because there were a bunch of people in RF foul territory). There were a bunch of people in LF homerun territory and this guy…

…was taking care of everybody. Right as we walked up to the wall in LF foul territory, this guy got a baseball and threw it to someone in homerun territory. Immediately, another ball came, and after spotting Tim he threw it to us. Three more balls came to LF within the next 3 minutes and this guy was all over the field shagging everything and he gave every one of those five baseballs to people in the seats. Very cool.

I had no clue who he was. So I did my zoom trick. No name on the glove. But he did have a number: 48 (click on the picture to the right to make it larger if you can’t see the 48 stitched on the glove). According to the A’s website this generous guy’s name is Michael Wuertz.

Thanks, Michael!

Soon, BP came to an end.

I wanted to do some more exploring, and so did Tim and my Dad. On our way out of the field level, I took the following picture of the A’s bullpen…

If that scene doesn’t shout “Major League bullpen” I just don’t know what does (hopefully you can read the sarcasm in that statement).

We were off to the upper deck. The true upper deck. The 300 level, which is only open in three sections right behind home plate. First, we had to figure out how to get up there.

It was pretty empty in the concourse as we made our way to the 300 level seats…

…but at long last, we made it:

You see that cement wall behind Tim? Guess what is over it? Well, for one thing, off in the distance: San Francisco:

(Hopefully you can tell that is three pictures put together. The bottom picture is the real picture. The middle is a zoomed in version of the bottom picture, and the top picture is zoomed in even further).

But we weren’t up here just to look over the wall. We were here to check out the view of the ballpark from the 300 level. Here is the view from the last row in Section 318 of the Coliseum:

Here are Tim and my Dad with the lovely green tarp behind them:

The 300 level steps are really steep and they have no hand rails:

And usher (who didn’t even demand to see our tickets) was kind enough to take our picture:

And then I got a panorama from the cross aisle across the front of Section 316:

We still had some time before the game started, so we headed back to the Stomper Fun Zone…

…where Tim had lots of fun:

Finally, the game was about to start. We went to the fan assistance booth on our way to our seats to ask where we could find ice cream helmets. The jumbo helmet last night was cool, but we wanted individual sized A’s ice cream helmets today. We were told to go to Section 130. But when we arrived one of the guys at the ice cream place informed us that they were OUT OF ICE CREAM HEMLETS! Instead, he offered us little styrofoam bowls that looked like they’d hold about 2 table spoons of ice cream.

Frustrated by this development, we suffered through our still delicious ice cream cones:

Okay, Tim doesn’t look like he’s suffering. But there are no individual sized A’s ice cream helmets in our collection today so the delicousness of the cones was bittersweet.

Finally, the A’s took the field…

…and this was our view from Section 125, Row 1, seats 3-5:

The A’s called on Trevor Cahill…

…and he was a dandy on this day. So was his defense:

The Angels called on Ervin Santana…

…who looked like he weighs about 75 pounds. He wasn’t terrible, but he wasn’t on par with Cahill on this day.

As usual, the guys in the bleachers had their A’s flags moving in a slow downward waving motion:

The A’s provided most of the offense at this game, but this is the only picture I took of an A’s batter…

…and the only reason I took the picture (of Gabe Gross) is because he was sporting number 18…a fine number.

There was no scoring in the first three innings, so I took some random shots of Tim and my Dad:

You might notice they are both looking back at me. I decided to sit in row 2, which was totally empty, because foul balls were flying all around us. Sadly, we would glove none of them.

Finally, the A’s got the scoring started in the bottom of the 4th inning when Ryan Sweeney hit an RBI double and then scored on a single by Gabe Gross (not in that at bat shown above).

It seemed like A’s relievers were walking back-and-forth in front of us all day…

…maybe they were visiting in the little boys’ room. Their bullpen, of course, does not have its own little boys’ room. Hey, did you notice who was in that back-and-forth picture? No, not 2009 Rookie of the Year, Andrew Bailey, I mean my “ball please” Brad Ziegler.

Tim amused himself by making me take a series of funny face shots and extreme-funny-face close ups…

…this would become a trend on this roadtrip.

So would this…

….”take a picture of me exploding this peanut!”

The Angels finally got on the board in the fifth inning when Juan Rivera hit this double to deep LCF…

…and then he scored on this bloop single…

…by Bobby Wilson.

The sun was beating down hot (but humidity free) and was tiring out Tim…

…finally he agreed to take off his under shirt and go with short sleaves. It was a good move. He pepped up almost immediately.

Not comfortable with a one-run lead, the A’s tacked on three more runs in the bottom of the fifth inning on singles by Daric Barton, Kurt Suzuki and Kevin Kooooooooouzmanoff.

Torii Hunter grounded out harmlessly in the sixth…

…Trevor Cahill was cruising. The A’s offense tacked on another run in the 7th on a sacrifice fly by Jack Cust.

In the ninth, Cahill turned the ball over to Andrew Bailey…

…who went one, two, three with this swing by Hideki Matsui…

…resulting in the final out of the game (a pop out to 3B).

This was a fun game in some great seats. We had an usher take out picture before heading out:

The day was still early and our next game was just over 24-hours and about 400 miles away. Instead of starting a long drive in the evening, we drove only about 40 miles south to San Jose where we dined at In-N-Out Burger…

…and Tim finally got his picture with a palm tree!

All around, it was an excellent day. And we were looking forward to another one the next day at Dodger Stadium, which would be Tim’s 20th MLB stadium.

Early in the week as Tim and I were preparing for the third installment of The Great Cook Grandfather-Father-Son Baseball Roadtrip of 2010, we got Chinese food from the new place in our grocery store. My fortune cookie was, indeed, prophetic:

“Great” enjoyment, actually.

Let’s get started.

The plan was to cover seven games in seven days (Wednesday, June 9th through Tuesday, June 15th) at all five MLB stadiums in California. My dad (a/k/a “Jim” or “Grandpa”) took off driving in his Prius from the Great State of Washington on Tuesday, June 8th. The next day, Tim and I hopped an airplane out of Philadelphia en route to San Jose, California:

Top Left: Still in Philadelphia, Tim played in the airport play area.

Top Right: Once in the plane, Tim strapped his trusty pillow (named “Pillow”) into the seat belt with him so Pillow would be safe on the journey.

Bottom Left: During a stop-over in Dallas, Texas, Tim played in a light room as we waited for our second flight.

Bottom Right: Approaching San Jose, we saw a seahorse cloud out of our window.

Grandpa picked us up in San Jose and we drove up to our hotel in Oakland to relax before our first game. We’d originally planned for our first game to be on June 10th. But that game was a 12:30 p.m. start so we had to fly in on the 9th, and the 9th featured $2 tickets at the Oakland-Aladema County Colesium, so we decided to add the June 9th game to our schedule as well.

Our hotel shuttled us to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) stop about 300 yards from the Colesium and we walked the elevated walk-way over to the Colesium:

Now, I like to stay positive on this blog and I intend to do my best here. But the razor wire lining the fence immediately outside of the Colesium should have been our first clue as to the quality of the stadium.

Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the game report, I’ll just share with you my conclusion from our two games in Oakland: plain and simple, the A’s need a new stadium.

The field of play itself is beautiful. But everything else about the place is lacking. Seriously, at times I felt embarrassed for the A’s. Their team is playing some decent ball this season, but the fans in Oakland deserve better than ownership is giving them at the Colesium (on many different levels).

That being said, don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed these two games with Tim and my dad — even though the games featured two of the Mariners A.L. West opponents (resulting in me wanting both teams to lose).

Here are some pictures of the outside of the stadium.

I don’t think those picture need much explanation. I’d just note that we walked around the outside looking for a spot to take a picture of “the stadium.” But everywhere we walked, all we saw was a bottom side of big cement steps. Seriously, there is nothing that says “MLB Stadium” about the outside of the Colesium.

One more comment about those pictures, see the kid in the bottom left picture wearing the full Angels uniform? We saw him both days in Oakland and the kid was decked out in a full, legit-as-they-come Big League Angels uniform. Undoubtly, a big Angels fan. Good to see, kid. I hope he enjoyed his time at the games.

Here is our first view of the inside of the stadium:

Straight away (by the “WELCOME” sign) is the field level concourse. This entry brings you in around the seats behind 1B.

We entered the stadium and headed over to the RF foul territory to watch some BP. This was our view:

We didn’t stay there very long. As we were standing along the 1B foul line…

…we saw former Mariner Joel Piniero hanging out in deep RCF. My dad decided to go up to the RF bleachers. In the picture above, my dad is standing under the top yellow arrow. Piniero was hanging out (off camera) by the tip of the lower yellow arrow.

This was my Dad’s view from the deep RCF portion of the bleachers:

Soon, Piniero made a high toss up and my Dad came away with the first baseball of the 2010 GFS Roadtrip. Finding the former Mariner, always an excellent plan!

By the way, on $2 ticket night (which did not include the bleachers), my dad had to talk his way into the bleachers during BP and promise that he would not stay there during the game. As you’ll see, he kept his promise.

Tim and I also hung out for a short while down the 1B foul line…

…soon we headed to the field level seats that wrap around the foul pole, right behind a special BBQ party deck (above to the right).

This was our view of the field just before a bunch of business people who would never have known they were at a baseball game filed into the party deck, gathered around the bar (to the far right by the yellow cone), and started to chat about everything but baseball:

The gates opened 1.5 hours before the game, so BP was already going on when we got into the field. As we were out in RF, not a single homerun reached the seats (I think in the whole stadium, not just RF).

But at least one did before we showed up, because a stadium worker came up and gave Tim a BP baseball. Now, we’re not real “ballhawks” so, you know what, we’re counting this stadium worker ball. We came to a game. Someone employed by a MLB team gave us a baseball that had been hit during BP by a MLB player. So, yep, that counts in our book.

Something funny happened out there in RF too. You know how all of the teams have photographers roaming their stadiums to tap you on the shoulder and ask, “Wanna take a picture for the [insert team name’s] website?” Well, one of those guys approached us in RF. Although I’ve never purchased one of the pictures, as a general rule, I always say yes. So the guy sets us up facing the RF seats (back to the field), and prepares to take our picture. Then the following occurred:

PHOTO GUY: “Ready, 1-2-3″

TIM: “ICHIRO!!!”

It was absolutely hilarious. Everyone in the section (which was about 10 people) and the photographer all cracked up laughing at Tim.

He took another picture, and Tim yelled “Ichiro!!!” again.

Just for kicks, to see the (better) picture that the guy took as Tim yelled “Ichiro!!!” at him click here.

RF was dead so we decided to walk around a bit. Quickly, we started noticing some odd things about the Colesium. Here are two of them:

Right: As Tim walked through the seats approaching the 1B (visitors) dugout, we noticed that the springs on many of the seats are worn out. This results in two things: (1) the seats stay in the “sitting” position whether or not someone is sitting in the seat and (2) if you try to move quickly through the rows of seats, you will bash your legs on the seats and end up with lots of bruises.

Despite the many things I thought got in the way of a good fan experience at the Colesium, the field was beautiful (as I already mentioned) and it looked great in photos. Here is the view from behind home plate:

Next, we headed into the field level concourse to pick up some dinner. Generally, I thought the concourse was alright. I grew up in the Kingdome and I can appreciate a no frills concourse. There seemed to be a lot of different food options. So, not bad. Here is what it looked like:.

But here is the MAJOR problem I had with the concourses:

Do you see it?

The stairs lead up to the 200 level, which I thought was kind of cool. People in the 200 level can access two different concourses. But see the open areas on either side of the stairs? They should be open concourses where fans could watch the game while buying a hot dog (or an ice cream helmet). But the A’s have put in what appear to be “after market” partitions that block the view of the game for people in the concourses. On the left, you can see the partition is simply a chain link fence with plastic slats weaved through the fence links. On the right, the partition is a solid wall that has been bolted into place.

I have no clue what the A’s were thinking when they put in these partitions. They are a terrible idea.

We grabbed some nachos and dollar hot dogs (Wednesday games are $2 tickets and $1 dogs) and headed up a ramp to the 200 level to eat dinner and watch the grounds crew prepare the field.

This is where the most ridiculous thing ever happened. This was our view as we sat in the first row of the 200 level (which is ostensibly the upper deck — most of the actual upper deck is “closed”):

We were in the shade and it was already getting cold, but we were enjoying ourselves. Then, an usher walked over to us from two sections to our right. What did he want, you ask? Well, to check our tickets of course! Yep, it was 6:27 p.m. (I know because I took a picture of the stadium clock right after this happened) and game time was 7:05 p.m., there were approximately zero fans sitting in the entire section (aside from us), and this guy felt the need to walk 150 feet over to check our tickets. It went like this:

USHER: “Can I see your tickets?”

TODD: “Our seats are over there (pointing to sunny side of stadium). We’ve just stopped here to eat our dinner.”

USHER: “You have to eat in your own seats.”

TODD: “Are you serious, its like an hour before the game.” (I overestimated a bit, but hey, it was at least 35 minutes before the game and NO ONE was sitting in the whole section).

USHER: “Yep.”

TODD: “Sweet…”

I seriously couldnotbelieve this. I’m pretty sure we were the last people to sit on those seats all night. Here is my theory, if you average a tiny little ittsy-bittsy crowd for each game, you should go out of your way to make sure those fans who do show up have a great time. And you shouldn’t go out of your way (like 150 feet) to act totally ridiculous to them.

Disgusted, I took this panorama as we took our forced walk to our own seats…

…did I mention this was 35 minutes before the game and there were like…I don’t know, you can estimate for yourself based on the photo…[insert tiny number] fans in the stadium?

Anyway, we didn’t let this event spoil our nachos…

…and, actually, now we were sitting in the sun.

Here was our view from our seats in row 10 of section 202 of the Colesium:

Ah, yes. The foul pole obstruction, excellent. Actually, it wasn’t too bad. We could all lean a little to the left or right and get a clear view of home plate.

After finishing our nachos, I left Tim and my Dad at our seats and I took a little tour of the Colesium.

Our seats were in the 200 level in RF, so I decided that I should head over to the bleachers in RF. Here is what I saw our my way to the bleachers:

Top Left: the RF side of the big CF expansion project from however many years back. I’m not an expert on the Colesium, but my assumption is that they put this in for the Raiders.

Top Middle: the LF side of the same thing.

Top Right: more of the “LF side of the same thing” showing a weird little astroturf area behind the seats in LF. I guess they use that for something at Raiders games.

Bottom Left: A’s championship flags and the California state flag flying between the RF bleachers and the RF field seats. As far as I could tell, these (and similar ones in LF) are the only flags at the Colesium. I didn’t see division standings flags anywhere around the stadium.

Bottom Middle: A long concrete hallway that runs the length of the outfield structure.

Bottom Right: a nice looking bar area that was not in operation and served only as a walkway from the RF concourse to the OF bleachers. This bar and a huge congregating room at the back of the OF structure appear to be used only for Raiders games.

From CF, I took these pictures of Stomper the A’s elephant mascot…

…and Tim and my Dad moments before the singing of the national anthem. By the way, the San Francisco Giants had the same red cart that Stomper is riding in this picture.

Here is the view from the second deck in the OF over toward RF:

Same from straight away CF:

Same from the last OF section in LF:

It was time to head into the infield concourse. Here is the view of the 200 level concourse in the LF foul corner:

90% of the upper deck (300 level) of the Colesium is closed for A’s games, you can only get up there right behind home plate. Everywhere else, you see barricades like this on the stairs up to the 300 level:.

Having an entire closed down level of your stadium is not ideal. But at least some of the barricades (e.g., to the left) had nice A’s logos on them. However, as you can see, other barricades (right) just had green mesh and “no trespassing” signs.

Here is the view from the back of the section in the LF seats in foul territory:

And a little closer to the infield:

Like all other stadiums, the Colesium has some luxury suites. Unlike other stadiums (I’m guessing), the suites (at least some of them) were empty with their doors propped open…so I took some pictures:

That picture is of the last suite on the 3B line.

Then I came upon one of the coolest parts of the Colesium. A large section of the second deck behind home plate (between 1B and 3B) is enclosed (i.e., its not an open concourse like everywhere else) and it is called the “West Side Club.” There is a bar and a restaurant that anyone can go in and visit. Here is a picture of the bar:

That picture might do it justice. Other than the silly barricade in the bottom left of the picture, it was a really nice looking bar.

Here is the view from the back of one of the seating areas in the West Side Club restaurant:

Now, here is the funny thing to think about You will be kicked out of the seats if you try to sit in the wrong seats to eat your dinner 35 minutes before the game when the stadium is essentially empty, but at any time with any ticket you can come and sit in this nice warm restaurant and eat your dinner with no questions asked.

We’d be back later.

Coming around the 1B side, I took this panorama from a handicapped seating area just inside of the entrance to the West Side Club down the 1B line:

By this time, the game had started and Dallas Braden was on the mound (his mound so don’t cross it!) for the Athletics…

…but he was not perfect on this night.

As I wound back around to the RF seats in the second deck, I came upon one of my favorite parts of the Colesium, a bunch of paintings hanging in the open air concourse down the 1B line:

Really, my favorite thing was the painting of the peanut man. I have a soft spot in my heart for Mariners peanut man (“The Peanut Man”) Rick Kaminski. I think characters like The Peanut Man really enhance the fan experience and should be celebrated by the organization. Someday, I hope the Peanut Man is enshined in the Mariners Hall of Fame. At minimum, he deserves an awesome painting like this hanging at Safeco Field. I really hope this peanut man is a real A’s (or Raiders) peanut man — that woul be pretty awesome.

By the way, the picture of Dallas Braden in the middle is actually on the outfield wall in LF (I just cut and pasted it into that picture of the paintings).

By the time I got back to the seats, it was cold and windy (despite the sun shining bright on us). I was not prepared. It had been a hot day. In the northeast, when its a hot day, the nasty humidity makes it a hot night and you don’t need to bring jackets, etc. to the game. Not the case in California. It got cold and windy and I didn’t have a jacket or a sweatshirt for Tim. Luckily, my Dad had an adult-sized light jacket for him to wear:.

I truly wanted neither team to win, so I hardly took any pictures of the action. I did, however, take this picture of Bobby Abreu from our seats in RF:

I’ve liked Abreu since his days in Philadelphia. I met him once and he was really cool. And he’s one heck of a hitter.

I was actually more into checking out the stadium than the game itself. Here is another weird thing that I discovered:

There is no direct passage from the dugouts to the clubhouses so the players have to walk through a pathway by the fancy seats behind home plate. The umpires also enter and exit through this little walkway on the 1B side.

With Tim warmed up, we were exited to see Stomper come visit the RF seats. We ran two sections over so Tim could get a picture with him:

We like mascots. And Stomper is a good looking mascot. After posing for a picture, Stomper played a little “give me five, up high, too slow, down low, too slow!” with Tim.

Next, Tim and I were off to the kids play area.

Three words sum it up: weak, extremely weak.

Actually, Tim had a lot of fun in the play area, but compared to other stadiums (like Philadelphia or Washington, D.C.) this place just does not cut the mustard. First off, you had to pay for the little rides with tokens that I never even saw where to get them. And at least one of the rides was broken down. The actual playset looked like it should be in a fan’s backyard, not at a MLB stadium. To see what a real MLB quality playset should look like, click here.

Here is the worst part:

Stomper, as I just said, is a cool MLB mascot. He’s a legit Big League caliber mascot. But each game, he has to come sit on this disgusting trash-heap of a “throne” to sign autographs. Check out the (i) ripped seating area (not just to astrosturf seat, but the padding under it as well), (ii) the pealing striped poles, and (iii) the dirty and pealing baseballs at the top of the columns.

Worst yet, the whole “throne” shook like it was going to fall apart.

I was seriously embarrassed for Stomper that the A’s make him sit on this piece of garbage. He unquestionably deserves better than this.

After meeting up with my Dad again in our seats, we determined that it was officially freezing cold. We decided to go to the West Side Club.

We ended up getting a table one row back from the windows…

…and Tim and I got an ice cream helmet for two! It was $10 and it came with hot fudge and caramel topping, plus whipped cream and cherries on top. Excellent.

Here is our glorious jumbo ice cream helmet:

And it was warm and toasty in the club.

While we were in there, two people caught foul balls right outside of our window — within 30 feet from us. So we headed out there for the end of the game.

Here was our view from the seats in front of the West Side Club restaurant:

It was past 9:00 p.m. Pacific Time, and Tim and I had been awake since about 4:00 a.m. Eastern Time, so he promptly crashed out in a most awkward position in the seats as my Dad and I watched the end of the game:.

The Angels won 7-1 on the strength of a complete game by Joe Saunders and the hitting of Eric Aybar and Torii Hunter. The A’s did not score their sole run until the bottom of the 9th inning. The small crowd gave a hearty cheer as the A’s scored and avoided a shutout.

Since the Angels won, we’d be rooting for the A’s the next day so the teams would split the two games and have little to no effect on the Mariners large hole in the AL West standings.

With Tim out like a light, an usher took took our picture before we left the stadium:

Despite the Colesium’s and the ushers’ shortcomings, we had a very nice time at our first game on the GFS. We would be back for more within 12 hours with a new, refreshed and positive outlook on the Colesium.

Friday night was our first Mariners game of the season! Tim and I, joined by my parents, got all fancied up in our M’s gear and headed down to Safeco Field. It was actually our second time to Safeco Field that day. Earlier in the day, we toured Safeco Field — and it was a blast…I’ll write about it later. Anyway, I’ve really only ever sat in two places at Safeco Field — my parents’ seats about 30 rows up from the 3B dugout (visitors) or my buddy Paul’s seats about 5 rows up from the Mariners dugout. So I was excited for this trip because we planned to get seats all around Safeco Field. This night, we had second row seats in the left field bleachers (Section 184, Row 2, Seats 5-8). Here was our view:

And here is a panoramic view from one section over toward CF:

They really are awesome seats. And at $15/ticket, they are a great deal. Here is the view looking over the railing, which I must admit was a bit scary with an active three year old.

Last season, Tim only attended two Mariners games – one in Baltimore that J.J. Putz blew the win in the 9th after Felix Hernandez pitched 8 scoreless innings and one in Seattle where the Indians just beat up on the M’s. Additionally, Tim has only seen the M’s win once in Seattle. It was his first game ever on 9/12/06. So we were looking for the M’s to get Tim back into the win column in a big way tonight.

In the top of the picture, Carlos Silva is warming up to start the game. To put it mildly, Silva has been a huge dissapointment so far. In his last start, he won his first game since June 2008. In between those wins, he had about 14-17 losses…not good. However, we remained hopeful that he would start a winning streak by notching his second win of the season against the A’s. Our optimism proved unwarranted, Silva gave up 6 runs in the third inning. So, we were happy when he earned a no decision.

This was Tim’s first time seeing the A’s. After we see the Rangers in a couple days, he will have seen the entire AL West. It will be the first complete division he has seen live. I’m quite happy about that since, after all, it is the most important division in MLB. By August 17, 2009, Tim will complete all six divisions in MLB.

Anyway, below Silva is A’s starter Dana Eveland. Eveland also would leave the game with a no decision after giving up 7 runs in 4.2 innings.

Anyway, back to the pictures. The left field bleachers are a good spot to get some interesting shots.

Here is a really cool shot looking up at the clock:

Here is the “concourse” under the left field bleachers:

Here are some shots of the “umbrella” (as you’ll see in my forthcoming entry about the May 2nd game, Safeco Field is an open air stadium even when the “roof” is “closed” so it is more properly called an umbrella):

Here are the glorious AL West standings flags showing the the M’s are in first place:

As you can see, it was a beautiful Friday night in Seattle. Here is an interesting picture from pre-game in the bullpen. I don’t know if the bullpen guys are praying or hyping themselves up or what…but its interesting…particularly because you can see a pink back pack on the ground behind the huddle. For those who don’t know, the M’s have a tradition of making their rookies carry stuff around in pink back packs. I’m not sure whose backpack is shown here.

Whatever they were doing, you gotta hand it to these guys. They came through be in this game (as did the Mariners bats) and saved Carlos Silva’s bacon…oh, wait…I’m not sure if the new slimmed-down Carlos can eat bacon any more. We’ll say the bullpen saved Silva’s outmeal instead.

Anyway, here is another cool picture you can only get from the left field bleachers. It is a look into the hand-run scoreboard where you can see the scoreboard operator catching a glimpse of the game:

Next, it was time for me to go on the move. Grandma was keeping Tim entertained in the seats, but he was ready for an ice cream helmet. So I headed to the Ben & Jerry’s shop at the bottom of the stairs at the left field entrance. Much to my surprise, I discovered B&J’s is gone and the space is empty. So I headed to the fan assistance office behind home plate. There, I told my story to the extremely nice and helpful people at the fan assistance office. Some of them were unaware that B&J’s was gone. So, one of them decided to walk with me to find ice cream helmets. She declared as any good fan assistance person would, “I’ll come with you. I need to know where you can get the helmets.” Here was my guide. I was upset I didn’t get her name because I would have emailed the M’s with my compliments and told them to give her a bonus. We found the helmets tucked away in a corner by the Mariners Hall of Fame. As I was buying Tim’s helmet (chocolate chip cookie dough…real ice cream, not soft serve!), I over heard my guide telling other M’s employees how Tim and I get an ice cream helmet at every stadium we visit. I turned around an reiterated, “Except Baltimore! The Orioles don’t have them. Feel free to call them and tell them at the Mariners suggest that they get ice cream helmets!” I think they are going to take my suggestion under advisement.

Anyway, so I got the ice cream and walked through the Mariners Hall of Fame on my way back to the seats. I’ll have more on the M’s Hall of Fame in a later entry, I have some ideas of some people who belong in the Hall (for a hint: watch the MLB network). As I strolled through the M’s Hall of Fame, a random M’s employee walks up to me and taps me on the shoulder and says, “Be sure to bring your son over here to get a picture picking off a home run! Lots of fun!” Apparently, this guy had heard of my ice cream helmet quest because Tim was still in the seats with Gma and Gpa and I wasn’t wearing a sign or anything proclaiming that I had a son at the game. I thought it was a thoughtful suggestion. Good going again Mariners employees!

One more word on the M’s HOF, its a nice little display area. However, it is in its infancy. The only members are Alvin Davis, Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner and Dave Neishaus. Eventually, Ken Griffey, Jr., Jamie Moyer, Randy Johnson and Ichiro will certainly all be members (I hope A-Rod is never inducted, the people of Seattle would BOO him like crazy at the induction ceremony). We visited the Reds HOF and the Indians HOF last years. The Reds HOF is the Gold Standard of team HOFs…I’m going out on a limb saying that because I haven’t visited all 30 teams. It is really an amazing display of the team’s history. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, I made it back to the seats where Tim and my folks were having a good time. But Tim had an even better time once his ice cream helmet arrived:

After ice cream, we started walking around a bit to find some new perspectives on the game. We headed out to CF where Tim threw some coins into the little-batting-boy fountain and we got this nice picture:

Then we ran into the Moose!

We then landed in the RF corner (Section 110) where this was our view:

My folks stayed in Section 110 for the rest of the game. But Tim and I headed over to section 124 to try to find my buddy Paul (and our friend Mark Dewar). Here is a view from the concourse as we scanned the crowd for Paul and Mark:

We ended upon going down the wrong aisle (should have gone down 123) to find Paul. But we found these excellent open seats:

We stood up between innings and watched the players in the M’s dugout. The biggest disappointment of the day was that Griff did not play. But we got this picture of him hanging out in the dugout…and I combined it with this picture of Ichiro walking back into the dugout:

Every time Griff would look over, Tim and I would wave at him. But he never waved back. I told Tim to yell “Hi, Griffey” when we waved. And it was hilarious, Griff would look our way and Tim would whisper so I could hardly hear him *hi, griffey*. Then he looked at me and asked, “Baseball players don’t know how to wave?” I told him there are so many people its hard for them to see each little boy to wave at them. But some day, we’ll get Griff to wave it him!

While we were standing behind the dugout, I saw Jarrod Washburn standing in the dugout (just to the left o Ichiro above). He was wearing a big Mariners jacket and I could see him spinning a ball around in the palm of his hand. Tim was on my shoulders. I made eye contact with Washburn and flashed him my glove as I yelled, “Hey, Jarrod how about that ball in your pocket?” He looked up at me like he really wanted to give it to Tim but for some reason just couldn’t do it. He said something to me, but I couldn’t understand him. But it was essentially, something like, “sorry, I can’t.” I said, “Ah, come on, Jarrod. You can do it. Its for a little boy!” He said sorry again. I turned around and sat down and a whole bunch of people looked at me and they all looked disappointed. One of them asked me what happened. I jokingly said, “Everyone should Boo Jarrod for denying this little boy a baseball!” No one booed, but there was sort a collectivey, “Ahhhhhhhhhhh” that came from the section. I turned around to sit down and the “Ahhhhhhhhhh” had broken Jarrod’s otherwise iron-will. The ball came sailing up to me and I gloved it. I yelled “Thank you” to Washburn. And we sat down and I gave Tim the ball. He immediately tried to throw it back to Washburn. I think he thought we were playing catch. I started to take a camera phone picture of us with the ball to send to my wife back home and a lady in front of me offered to take it. Here is the picture. Its pretty hilarious because Tim is starting to cry because he couldn’t throw the ball back to Jarrod (also, we had just flown from Pennsylvania the night before and it was essentially 2:00 a.m. for me and Tim at the time….which is well passed his bed time. Anyway, the picture:

Anyway, the ball was mighty happy to be coming home with us. And he’s a big Mariners fan so he’ll fit in just great at our house. Here he is giving us a big Mariners smile:

After catching the ball, we headed back to Section 110 and watched the rest of the game with my folks. The game was great. It was a tie game in the bottom of the ninth. The M’s loaded up the bases and one of my favorite young M’s, Jose Lopez, strode to the plate. He had an epic 15-pitch at bat. After the count went to 2-2, the pitcher didn’t throw another ball. Lopez fouled off 10 pitches in a row. Here he is in a blurry far-away picture:

On the 15th pitch, Lopez ended the game with a sharp line drive to left center. MARINERS WIN!!!

Awesome game! Awesome seats! Awesome family times! Tim climbed onto Grandpa’s shoulders and we headed to the car. More to come…

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